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Jeffrey Carter's avatar

If you don't protect Supreme Court justices private homes from violent protestors, you might be living in a pre-Marxist society

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Craig Pirrong's avatar

1. Scott McKay of the American Spectator argues that this decay is deliberate. He calls it "weaponized government failure." In a nutshell: the kleptocrats in city governments realize that the middle class is the biggest political threat to them. So make the city unlivable for them, drive them out, and leave behind a class of those dependent on the kleptocrats, and which is likely to be atomized, uneducated, and unmotivated to challenge. This entrenches the kleptocrats for life. Better to rule over a wasteland where they can still skim money than actually have to perform productive work outside politics.

2. St. Louis' decline began in the 1960s. It was on a somewhat shallower trajectory than Detroit's, but downtown was dying by the 1990s when I moved there (while teaching at Wash U Olin) and it was clear it was never coming back.

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