Detroit, Dresden, and Hiroshima

         As everyone knows, Hiroshima, Japan was nuked into oblivion.  Not much earlier, firebombing dispatched Dresden, Germany to the same awful destination.  Yet, firebombed Dresden and A-bombed Hiroshima now are jaw-droppingly more vibrant, prosperous, safe, and productive than is Detroit, which -- far from being either nuked or firebombed -- was actually at the top of our so-called Model Cities program.  We were going to demonstrate in Detroit (and elsewhere) just what urban wonders our leftist social engineering could produce.  It was going to be the Democrats’ shining city on a hill.

         It never happened.  The devastating results of the Model Cities program, and of countless similar government projects both larger and smaller, now spread out for miles before our eyes every time we exit the freeway to drive the surface streets in so many of Detroit’s gruesome neighborhoods -- its multiple, mini, urban, ghost towns.  If any “shining” now emits from some of Detroit’s neighborhoods, it’s most likely the uncountable, citizen-lit, smoldering fires that render so much of that once great city unfit for human habitation.

         In other words, the long-term effects of crushing defeat at the hands of our military are not nearly so ruinously enduring as are the twisted, domestic machinations of our leftist politicians in a time of peace.  If you want long-term prosperity, it's far better to be defeated and rebuilt by American largesse and American private enterprise than to be run by America’s Democrats and their union lackeys.  Detroit is proof.

         Contemporary Detroit is precisely what you get after more than 50 uninterrupted years of Democratic rule in one city.  That half-century-long cabal of leftists and labor unions turned old Detroit into current Detroit -- a hollowed-out, urban shell where the population has gone from nearly 2 million down to around 700,000.  In fact, Detroit has shrunk more than 25% in the last ten years.  If Edmund Burke is correct, and I think he is, that when the population of a region increases and property ownership and values are maintained, the regime in charge is doing tolerably well; and that when the population decreases precipitously and property ownership and values plummet, the regime is a great failure, then we must conclude that in Detroit the regime is now, and has been for decades, a great failure.

         Innumerable state, local, and federal programs intended to make things better in Detroit continually only make them worse, and have done so for many years.  The toxic combination of government-sponsored charity and social engineering of the sort we have been practicing is, literally, the kiss of death.  Freedom, prosperity, and human dignity are not found down that road.  Policies like the ones we now practice never made any nation prosper -- not any nation and not any city.  The welfare state is not what rebuilt Germany or Japan, and it will not rebuild Detroit.

            The devastation in Detroit continues because its voters keep asking for it.  They keep putting into office persons whose policies kill cities -- and citizens.  So many of Detroit’s wounds are self-inflicted.  Those wounds cannot heal until Detroit voters decide to vote the blight-making Democratic bums out of office, and keep them out of office, for decade upon decade.

         It’s an old saw, but true:  You get the kind of government you deserve.  Your deserving is reflected in your voting.  Until Detroit’s voters make fundamentally different choices, they prove they deserve no better, and no better is what they will get.

         For the good of the nation, any nation, liberals ought to be voted out.  They do not understand how prosperity is gotten; they do not know the many, many things governments cannot do well; and (most especially) they do not understand that whatever undermines the traditional family undermines culture, society, and the polis.

         The socialist and labor governments in Europe and Japan after WWII are not an exception.  They could not have succeeded in rebuilding their nations without the huge influx of money from elsewhere, an influx that would have been even more productive had the German and Japanese regimes in those days known better how to rule and therefore when to keep their hands off.  That enormous influx of outside money was only partly and temporarily money from government.  The private influx of investment was later, greater, and more productive than the government money.  That influx of non-government money was not possible from within Germany and Japan’s own blighted systems.  Loads of American private enterprise made it happen; government intervention nearly stalled it.

         Please note:  I am not saying that there shouldn't be two (or more) political parties.  I am saying that voters should not vote for leftists because leftism is deeply and desperately flawed, both politically and economically.  Like Edmund Burke, I think that party politics is part of how to help hold down corruption.  An opposition party can be a very useful aid to better government.  We can safely assume that mature and serious citizens desire good government.  Leftism, however, is not good government.  The more leftist the government, the more mistaken and dangerous it is.  It's all there in Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn.

         

-->Or, as a friend reminds me, when Detroit area native Michael Barone was asked what changed him from a Democrat to a Republican, he said:  “One word, Detroit.”