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
