As always, when the central planning bureaucrats get in a jam with no way out of the mess they have planned themselves into, they turn to libertarian ideas for the answers. Libertarian ideas with a big-government twist, that is. This article in the Telegraph is astounding: “US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive.”
The problem is that American cities are far too centralized and they can no longer be managed effectively by fraudulent, socialist, politically-corrupt city administrations whose financial houses are in disarray. So government planners are starting to realize the need for decentralization, especially in the cities such as Detroit, where no amount of money or sky-high tax rates can ever bring them back from the dead.
The answer to secession, for the bureaucrats who can’t let go of their central planning-control genes, is to strategically bulldoze cities such as Flint, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis. This is hailed as a “radical experiment” by a man from Flint, Michigan named Dan Kildee. Flint, the city made famous by Michael Moore, is a small city that now resembles a gigantic, razed parking lot with several years worth of overgrown weeds. I can see this idea picking up steam because, at some point, the problem of half-empty huge cities that are riddled with crime, poverty, welfare, and unemployment, will have to be addressed.
What these bureaucrats are really saying is, “We need a secession, a decentralization.”The status of big cities in America is blamed on America’s obsession with growth and the “deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that “big is good” and that cities should sprawl…” However, that is only part of the problem. It is never mentioned in this story that government is the problem and government perpetuates the growth syndrome through its centralist planning system. The cities have long been gigantic social laboratories for the urban Marxists who run them so that they can concoct experiments and play with human lives. The Great Society, along with 40 years of welfare state social engineering, has taken its toll on cities like Detroit that once flourished.
Building smaller cities from large, decayed ones is the bureaucrats’ answer to secession. But of course, a government-planned secession would make these places no better off than they are now because ultimately, political nepotism, favoritism, and partisan scheming will coordinate the end results. The newer, smaller, government-planned cities will be built from Marxist sociological foundations, thereby eliminating any proliferation of free-market influence and activity.
The only logical and possible answer for the break-up of these overwhelmed cities is natural secession, with smaller, decentralized governments clearly having a greater potential for addressing the problems and offering free-market solutions.
Thanks to Michael Gaddy for the link.
See Jane Jacobs on this issue.
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities – Jane Jacobs
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Why don’t they bulldoze the government buildings and then stop? I’m all for that.
Didn’t work so well for Rome(IIRC, Constantine stayed with the Greek half of the Empire).
Sounds like another Nero Decree. If you can’t rule it effectively, destroy it.
Create A Model Classical Liberalism City
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Alertness And Responsiveness Give Cities Great Potential.
The interesting aspect of all of this is the potential flexibility of these smaller ‘units.’ Imagine if you would a scenario where local officials begin to talk among themselves about the merits of classical liberalism. Imagine that they actually come to the realization that prosperity would come to them magnetically if all the disincentives of interventionism were abolished. Imagine if they actually realized that being a statesman is far more glorious than being an ego-driven interventionist and that the moral and ethical thing to do is to preserve and protect property rights.
As a consequence of free trade and commerce and the justice of a contractual society, the flow of goods and services and the engendering of happy people would quickly transform the previously wasted and lethargic resources into an engine of prosperity.
Now back to the initial point. This potential is very near the surface in cities of all sizes. In cities, if the elected local representatives are respected because they possess qualities of character, but like most they are indoctrinated by the propaganda of the government about ‘democracy,’ and then they have the good fortune to find the logic and ethics of classical liberalism there is a real chance that they can easily gain the consent of the local people to make the change.
Who would object to no taxes, and a prosperous environment for businesses, and protection of property rights?
All of us, therefore, have the honor and responsibility to perservere and to try to educate the people in our communities who are serving in leadership capacities about the principles of classical liberalism.
Is it secession or self-preservation at this point? The parasitic leviathan steeped in socialism and fascism will kill the cities to save its wretched self otherwise!
Clearly, the cities of Detroit and Flint should just be abolished and sold off piecemeal to the highest bidder. These new entrepreneurs should be exempt from all local taxes and regulation, including being free of school districts and they should be allowed to build private neighborhoods as they please to the extent they can make money in the market. The can allow into the neighborhood whomever they please and keep out whomever they don’t want. They can build schools for their patrons or not. They can allow in drugs or forbid drugs or even forbid anyone who has ever looked at a drug. Put a gate and a guard on it if you like. I suspect that there is a huge demand for safe, child-friendly, drug-free and scumbag-free neighborhoods in southeast Michigan.
Eeek (a mouse), that’s racist, says the liberal. No, noodle-brain. Forcing poor minority people to live your commie welfare-state hellhole is racist.
The key part of the story, buried as expected, was this- they are razing the abandoned sections, but the city itself is not disincorporating those sections. What incentive could anyone have to purchase this freed up land if the City of Flint retains jurisdiction?
To expand on the thoughts of Bob Roddis, perhaps people in Michigan should take the advice of Eek-A-Mouse and embark on some good ol’ entrepreneurial Ganja Smuggling.
From the city’s perspective, demolishing the sectors reduces the number of places criminals can easily hide and the number of firetraps.
Consider this; raze the city and return to the pioneer spirit that settled the West. Allow budding businesses to “stake a claim” so that they might relocate there. Then get the hell out of their way.
I grew up in that area, across the St. Clair River in Ontario. Great soil for farming.
Maybe we could have a forced resettlement program to transfer people from prosperous sections of the country to depressed sections of the country. You know, kind of like the wonderful forced-busing programs that made our schools wonderful.
David, you are a genius! The bureaucrats will love you for this! We need to encourage people to voluntarily do what is best for them. How do we know it is the best thing for them? They go to jail if they don’t do it!
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