American Cities are Squalid
In Deep Decline
It doesn’t matter which big American city you go to these days, most are in absolutely horrendous condition. The public transportation system stinks of human waste. My old friend Professor Paul Magelli from the University of Illinois told me that when he took the Amtrak from Champaign to Chicago, it smelled like “piss”. Trains in other countries didn’t smell like that.
Richard Florida is a big urbanologist. He is an elite for sure. He tweeted out this article and it is worth reading. The author of the article is aware of what is happening in American cities, but like Richard Florida, totally unaware of what is causing it.
The author cites “regulations”. Richard Florida in his tweet decries the “centralization policies” of big cities.
Any clue which political party and what kind of people have run big American cities for more than five decades?
Even reading through the comments, the people don’t have a clue. Some blame the economy. Some blame going off the gold standard!
NO ONE BLAMES WHAT IS IN PLAIN SIGHT.
It’s the Democrats. This isn’t rocket science. Centralization is their mantra and their raison d’être. Government control. Reagan once said, If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
The corollary to that is the Democratic way of thinking. If it moves, regulate it. If it keeps moving, regulate it to pick winners and losers, shuffling the winners to your political cronies. If it stops moving, tax the producers and redistribute the tax to the cronies.
I was talking to some friends. They live near San Francisco. They don’t go there anymore. It’s too dirty. It is too full of bums and homeless. It’s too full of poop and needles. They didn’t know how it would change and just settled on accepting what is. When I mentioned that Democrats ran the city for generations and that if people voted Republican instead, maybe things would change their mouths hung open and there were blank looks on their faces. Even then, they didn’t understand.
This is why I have little patience for Republicans that say they will stay home if their candidate “isn’t the one”. By staying home, you enable the Establishment who want to take your freedom away bit by bit. By staying home, you enable the Democrats who certainly want to usurp your freedom and rights as originally defined by the Bill of Rights. By staying home, you enable the growing band of socialists that will certainly re-educate you and send you to the gulag. See what is happening to Jordan Peterson in Canada.
If you are wealthy, you will be able to rise above a bunch of the stuff that they have planned for you. But, it will cost you. They will claw and claw at the wealth that you earned. If you are hyper-wealthy, you will certainly be able to rise above it as long as you toe the line and do the right thing. As soon as you buck them, they will confiscate your wealth and make sure you fall in line.
We saw some of this with Covid. Don’t get the shot, lose your job. Don’t get the shot, you should be quarantined to a camp. Free speech be damned. Free movement be damned.
History since the Civil War shows the pull towards centralization the Democratic Party has. It’s in the DNA of the party and cannot be changed. It is cultural. It was FDR that quarantined Japanese American citizens in WW2. He wasn’t a Republican. It was Jefferson Davis that led the Confederacy. He wasn’t a Republican. It was Democratic southerners that embraced and enforced Jim Crow, enabled by a Democratic-leaning Andrew Johnson from Tennesee after Lincoln’s assassination. They trample on individual liberty at any chance they get.
Voting for the current Democratic Party is the road to serfdom. It is also the road to socialism. There certainly are Republicans in name only (RINO) that run. They tick you and me off. But, the key is to elect enough good people who believe in small government and the way the Constitution and Bill of Rights were originally written so the RINOs are forced to do the right thing.
In the current Republican presidential primary, there are only two candidates that are on the side of small government. The female one is not. Every candidate has their downside, but the opportunity cost is far higher than their downsides.
If you stay home, you enable them and you are part of the problem, not the solution.
Hard to argue with any of this. It's absolutely the truth. On top of it all, Dems want you to think that things are not so bad. Why aren't people going out after dark in Chicago? It's beyond bad. Doom loop - coming to a Blue City near you....
Fantastic post. I suspect writing about big city decay could be an almost never-ending topic. But you are correct, there is one (open and obvious) common denominator: Democrats. The fact that the elites miss this known fact says all you need to know about elites... forget them. The societal problem, however, grows larger with the self-Balkanization of our country. Which serves to only fortify and make seemingly permanent the vast cultural divide pulling our country apart.