Doctor Detroit and Uncle Sam

        

         I want to talk about Detroit and about the federal government.  I do so because they share a disease.  It's called liberal politics.  It masquerades as "balance" and "compromise.”

         Suppose you were sick and needed a doctor desperately.

         Suppose your doctor prescribed a mixture of real curatives and of deadly poison, say a mixture of penicillin and curare.

        Suppose your doctor defended this approach to medicine as “balanced” and a “compromise.”

         From such a deadly and incompetent doctor you doubtless would flee for your life.  One does not “balance” penicillin with curare, or vice versa.  If you do, nothing is “compromised” but your survival. 

         As hideous, bizarre, or unimaginable as that medical scenario seems, its political equivalent works itself all out around us every day, on both the local and national level.  I am sorry to say that this deadly doctor’s political cousins live and work not only in Washington, but also in Detroit, where they have been in business for decades.  For anything that ails us, whether it has a political cure or not (and most human problems have no political cure), they prescribe poison and defend doing so as a “balanced” approach and a suitable “compromise.”  They want to “balance” the curative of deficit reduction with the double curare of higher taxes and greater spending.  They've tried it all, from the "Model Cities" program, to Head Start, to welfare, to state and federal subsidies.  It doesn't work.

             It will never do; it never has.  For Detroit in particular, nothing works.  After more than 60 straight years under a Democratic mayor, it's all been tried.  It's failed.  But Detroit voters keep voting the same pack of reckless, incompetent losers back into office regardless of their desperately dismal record, losers who think that "compromise" solutions work.  

        Electing them makes as much sense as hiring a football coach who calls a lot of plays sure to lose ground because he wants a “balanced” offense and wants to “compromise” with the other side.  You wouldn’t accept that nonsense from your football program.  Don’t accept it from your government.

         But intellectual times have gotten so bad that if you refuse to accept nonsense like this from your government, those who work in that government will denigrate you publicly and then banish you to Middle Earth, as if you, and not they, were the devotees of fiction, fable, and myth.  It never occurs to them to notice that the cities of Dresden and Hiroshima both are better off today after being completely destroyed by the Allies in WWII than is Detroit after 60 years of peace time rule under an unbroken sequence of Democratic regimes.

         Please do not miss my point:  As a city, you have a better future if you are destroyed by Allied forces in a time of war than if you are run for decades by Democratic mayors in a time of peace.

         It’s as if we've all gone mad.  Because wisdom is irreplaceable; and because stupidity has consequences, contemporary politicians need to be reminded that two opposite ideas cannot both be right at the same time and in the same way.  They might both be wrong, but they cannot both be right.  In such a situation, if you wish to find a balance between those opposite prescriptions, then you know for certain that you are mixing poison into your cure.  Why anyone would wish to prescribe political and economic poison is simply beyond the pale of prudence.

             For example, all but the most conceptually benighted (i.e., Harvard trained) among us understand that raising taxes in a time of severe economic hardship is a fool’s prescription.  It’s poison.  It kills.  It sucks away venture capital so that new businesses are not begun and old businesses are not expanded.  It creates a climate of uncertainty and economic oppression such that prudent investors either hold their money in reserve or else send it elsewhere, where policies are more sensible and predictable, where investment can actually pay off, and where the payoff won’t be confiscated to fund even more “balanced” poisoning.

            In other words, sucking blood from the successful by raising their taxes (1) drives up unemployment to ever higher and higher levels; (2) higher unemployment levels create more poor; whom our political witch doctors (3) try to help by sucking even more blood from the successful, which (4) keeps the poor coming back to the witch doctors again and again, generation after generation, which (5) keeps the witch doctors in business and in power.  You can't fix what's wrong by raising taxes.  And you can't do it with more casinos.  

         The political witch doctors and economic blood letters now in charge of the federal government, and in charge of Detroit, addicted as they are to their own pencillin/poison intravenous cocktails, cannot help themselves.  They cannot stop.  They habitually prescribe economic poison -- higher taxes -- and they relentlessly apply their leeches, both to the veins of the successful (via taxes) nationally, and the soon-to-be-unsuccessful (gamblers via casinos), locally.  In southeastern Michigan, it's the only prescription they know:  Suck blood from some; turn it into an addictive; give that addictive to others; and keep them coming back for more.  From Detroit, the wealthy have left.  Precious few remain.  They are tired of being clay pigeons in the local political skeet shoot.  

           In other words, imagine your horrid fate if your doctor were your pusher.

        My point is this:  Not all the political quacks and charlatans operate out of Washington.  We should be so lucky.  We are not.  The witch doctors, the quacks, and the charlatans live and work in Detroit too.  We’ve been going to them for more than 60 years in a row, and they have tried to "balance" every proposed curative with old poison.  The unbalanced devastation is everywhere to be seen.

         Call your doctor “Democrat,” and call yourself “Detroit.”

         The Flying Wallendas were a "balancing" act, too.  You might recall what happened to them -- in Detroit.