Decrepit Cities Are A National Security Problem

St. Louis Is the Latest

Decaying and decrepit cities are nothing new to Americans. The depths to which Detroit sunk were surprising to many Americans, but most of them were able to shield their eyes from it because it just didn’t have any impact on them. Detroit was easily avoidable. Don’t go there.

Today, it’s not just Detroit. It’s Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and if you read the Wall Street Journal today, St. Louis.

The price for the AT&T Tower, three blocks from the Railway Exchange, was a sliver of the $205 million it sold for in 2006. Its value has been falling for years. In 2022, it changed hands for just $4 million.

I am sure you can go to real estate listings and find single-family homes or apartments that sell for $4MM. The AT&T office building is 44 stories. According to the corrupt attorneys in the city of New York, Donald Trump could have sold his Mar a Lago property and bought it 4.5 times.

People who look at the surface tend to blame surface things for the decline because they don’t want to admit the core causes. They also don’t want to topple the corrupt crony capitalist networks that have been established because of entrenched government policies. “The department store closed but department stores are closing all over the US and shopping malls are hurting. It’s Amazon’s ($AMZN) fault.”

No, it’s not Amazon’s fault.

“Japanese car makers came and took the market from Detroit because Detroit’s management didn’t see what the Japanese saw.”

No doubt, Detroit automaker management screwed up. But, it happened in the early 1970s. How are they still screwed up? Bear in mind, there are tariffs and duties on foreign cars coming in the US too. Tariffs do not work and only raise the price for consumers.

Detroit and Michigan politicians have as much, or more blame than the management teams at the Big 3 automakers.

Why is San Francisco a hellhole when the bulk of innovation that revolutionizes the world happens there and near there in Silicon Valley?

The political leadership in most large American cities is progressive and hard leftist. In other periods of human history, we might have referred to them as Marxists. There is little difference in their attitude and the Marxist philosophy.

Watch Eli Steele’s new 37 minute documentary if you want to see this new progressive leadership in action.

Is there a difference between Eli’s movie criticizing the government-industry it is focusing on and any other government-industrial complex? In places like Chicago, how many efforts exist that are government-backed which are supposed to jumpstart an effort, or solve a problem? They are filled with cronies that have permanent jobs with absolutely no measurable metrics to judge success or failure by.

Except they get to go on trips, have lunches, sit on panels at conferences and pontificate. Generally, these people hit the color-by-number diversity marks so political leaders can point to them and revel in the glory of how much they are helping to bring up a downtrodden victim class.

Meanwhile, nothing happens.

Eli makes the point that the hard leftists in America are not only anti-Semites, but foster a climate of anti-Semitism.

I would go further than Eli. I think he would agree with me. The hard leftists in America not only foster and enable hate against Jews. They foster and enable hate against anyone who is successful but doesn’t believe the same things in the same way they believe them.

It’s not a belief system. Belief systems can be challenged and change. It’s more like worship. It’s cult-like. Remember, when leftists accuse you of something they usually are projecting their own psychology. They accuse Trump supporters of being in a cult. Guess who is in the cult? They accuse free market capitalists of only caring about money. Guess who only cares about money?

Elon Musk was an okay guy when he was building spaceships and electric cars. He is a pariah because he bought Twitter and believes in free speech.

When I was watching Eli’s movie I suddenly realized something. Marxists love "process". They love hearings and meetings. The solution has already been decided, but they hide behind the ''process" and the "meeting" so "everyone can be heard". They delay delay delay, painstakingly so, then finally drop the hammer and do the pre-decided solution which always takes freedom away and hurts normal citizens.

This situation in American cities has become a national security problem.

Why?

It’s not just the crime and the lawlessness. That’s a problem too. No, it has to do with the way humanity has worked for thousands of years. Cities are the breeding ground for great ideas and innovation. The ideas that get bounced around in cities and challenged in conversations are the same ideas when executed upon lift up standards of living and make our lives significantly better.

It can’t happen online though there are those that would vehemently disagree with me. I think one thing Covid isolation should have taught us is that we are more productive and collaborative when we are in physical proximity to each other.

That’s why having a vibrant city center is crucial to things like economic development. Without economic development, you hurt the nation’s security.

Michaelangelo was a great artist and Da Vinci a great thinker, but they were nothing until they went into a city and presented themselves. The great thinkers in Scotland who created the ideas upon which modern-day free market civil societies are established did it in hand-to-hand conversation with each other. You might say Zoom meeting software didn’t exist but you don’t have the same types of conversation on Zoom that you do in person.

Physical presence with the human sense of touch, smell, sound and internal feeling has much more impact.

I look at a city like St. Louis and it is decrepit. I was there a few years ago. I stayed at the University Club downtown and walked through the city. I went to the Cubs vs Cardinals game (Cubs won!). It was bad then but it is far far worse now and there is probably no coming back.

Why is there no coming back?

City political leadership would rather have power over ashes than put in place policies that would allow people to thrive and have self-determination. A wealthier populace can rise above them, and ignore them.

Marxists do not like to be ignored. They want to be the center of life.

Why else is there no coming back?

People currently have a choice. Stay in places like St. Louis, or get the hell out. There are rivers of people getting the hell out. Some only go as far as the suburbs. Some go to other states. But, they aren’t staying.

It’s impossible to reverse the tide with the current leadership in decrepit cities.

They tax. They use government bureaucracy to belittle businesses to enforce the power structure they implemented. They permit. They license and centralize control. City leadership holds committee meetings and decides what can happen where and when.

Here is a perfect case and point. One of the reasons the Chicago Bears aren’t going to build in the suburbs of Cook County is because the Socialist tax assessor Fritz Kaegi overly taxed them and will continue to raise taxes on them once the stadium is built. He is carrying out the marching orders of Cook County President, Marxist Toni Preckwinkle.

The underlying problems are hard to correct. The breakdown of the American family is a core cause of the death of American cities. When you have so many children born out of wedlock without a father, without an intact nuclear family, you tear at the fabric of society.

The breakdown of organized religion tears at the foundation of civil society. Civil society has always instituted the root values of the Judeo-Christian religion into their political policy. Thou shalt not kill becomes outlawing murder. Thou shalt not steal becomes outlawing burglary and robbery. Judeo-Christian values lift up the individual over the collective. They value the collective as a support network for the individual, but the individual relationship with a supreme being supersedes the collective.

Mainline protestant religion which has abdicated and kneeled before the Marxist values of collectivism has done a huge disservice to its congregants and society at large. Jewish temples that have done the same, are the same.

Islam was never on par with both of those religious canons and has always valued the collective over the individual.

Corporate America which used to be objective and focused on growth is now focused on victimhood. It’s shifted to the left. Many promotions are based on DEI color by number diversity and not merit. Ads are not to get you to use their product but to prostrate themselves on the altar of Progressivism.

Our public educational system is now useless. You do your child a disservice sending them to public school even in lily white wealthy suburban parts of the country. People are uneducated. It’s not that they aren’t smart. They are. They aren’t educated and incapable of objective thought, critical thinking, and problem-solving. They have been indoctrinated and passed through a system based on victimhood and not merit.

White males are leaving college or not going. Why? Because when you are told you are the problem and that you suck, why should you endure four years of it when you could do something else? Especially when you know you won’t be able to compete for a corporate job (see two paragraphs above).

Instead, they are going into small businesses which are on the outskirts of government regulation. They are going into merit-based occupations that have measurable outcomes. This will happen with other classes of people who previously thought they might be in a victim class but now are considered oppressors.

Civilian Civic organizations that once were great repositories and labs for germinating and disseminating cutting-edge ideas have rotted. They have been taken over by the Progressives who use them to evangelize and push the Marxist progressive agenda. Instead of empowering people, they herd people into the feedlot. If you know anything about feedlots you know what happens after.

It is good to see people like Garry Tan fight. We need more like Garry Tan in every decrepit city in America. Garry is untouchable. He’s made it. He has lived the American dream and he is wealthy. The wealthy should be fighting because they can afford to speak out and fight.

Some people would like to fight but cannot because they are building a career. They are afraid of the intense blowback they would get from the community and the progressive hard left-wing media. They are fearful and keep to themselves so they can survive and raise their kids in peace.

Then there are others in their peer group that are on the other side. They are dangerous people. Marxists never seem to change their stripes. You’d have to really be open to listening to people like Roger Simon, Dennis Prager, or Thomas Sowell. They were all Marxists before they saw the light.

We will see more and more of these stories of cities dying. The articles on them will blame something else that seems logical but doesn’t get to the real reason why.

From the linked WSJ article:

“It’s a classic chicken and egg kind of deal,” said Glenn MacDonald, a professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis’s Olin Business School. “People don’t go there because there’s nothing to do. There’s nothing to do because people don’t go there.”

Gee, is that all there is? Is it that simple? Or Professor, are you looking at the problem with too tight of a lens and too narrow of a focus? Coming up with an explanation that sounds like Yogi Berra isn’t an answer.