Dystopia Comes to Michigan: Detroit, Unions, and Welfare

         Because they are the two chief contributing factors in Detroit’s fiscal demise, I’m going to talk about (1) Detroit and unions and (2) Detroit and poverty, in that order. 

         (1) Detroit and Unions

         If you have gout, you must be careful what drugs you take and when you take them.  If you take drugs from the xanthine family, it can help control gout.  But if you take xanthine at the wrong time, it can actually cause an attack.  Labor unions are like xanthine.  They can do, and have done, some good.  But taken at the wrong time or in the wrong way, they produce problems, not solve them.  Detroit is a case in point:

         When the Detroit car makers were in their heyday, the unions thrived.  As a result, they became increasingly powerful and effective within southeastern Michigan.  They voted en masse for Democratic politicians and, as a result, those politicians often got elected.  Consequently, those elected politicians supported extending union representation to public sector workers.  Those public sector unions were very effective in acquiring generous pay raises, numerous vacation days, excellent health care coverage, and outstanding retirement packages for their members.  The unions could not, however, get for the city of Detroit the money it needed to pay for those impressive public sector benefits.  Even so, the city’s Democrat leadership, not known for fiscal restraint or for prudent taxation, simply went ahead and approved union contracts that the city could not afford without imposing higher and higher tax rates.  They taxed and they spent, which, for the Dems, is standard operating procedure.    When the tax rates got too high, auto workers and municipal employees, the chief beneficiaries of union power, jumped ship.  They moved out of Detroit into the suburbs, where their taxes went to support other communities, leaving Detroit a mere shell of a city, with block upon block of once thriving neighborhoods reduced to an urban desert.  In the ‘50s, it was white flight.  In the ‘60s, it was black.  Once folks reached the middle class and could afford to do so, they fled.  Detroit lost more than 60% of its peak population, declining from a population of almost 2 million to less than 700,000.  While the Detroit carmakers were thriving, things remained in, if not acceptable, then at least temporarily sustainable, condition.  They could afford to pay more, and did.  But once the carmakers had to compete against German, Japanese, Swedish, English, and Korean carmakers, the game changed dramatically.  Conditions worsened for everyone in and around the Detroit auto industry.  They had to re-consider, and even re-negotiate.  In order better to handle their worsening finances and their heavier financial burdens, workers moved out of town.  Retirees did too, taking their very large and generous retirement packages with them not simply to other towns or other states, but even to other nations, leaving nothing behind for Detroit but uninhabited houses and empty lots that produced no income for the city.  But the Democratic leadership of Detroit stayed the course.  It marched blithely and blindly in a direction it falsely believed was forward.  Despite a declining tax base, Democratic leadership continued to approve ever more generous contracts for its municipal union workers, and ever more welfare payments for its poor, thereby putting the city on track for a financial train wreck.  While the Democrats’ plan did not fix the problem, it did get Democratic politicians re-elected.

         With higher financial commitments, and fewer taxpayers to foot the bill for them, the city predictably plunged into greater debt, which it amplified by:  (1) extensive and expensive political corruption, and (2) maintaining a municipal superstructure much too large for its population and its tax base.  Over time, the city’s debt climbed not merely into the millions (or even hundreds of millions) of dollars, but to nearly 20 billion, which is clearly unsustainable for any city in rapid financial and population decline.  Detroit’s is the largest municipal failure in history, period.  That’s how terrifically incompetent Detroit’s leadership actually is -- the all-time worst.  Yet, rather than vote the incompetent Democratic bums out of office, Detroit voters kept them securely in place, voting Democratic regimes into power, one after the other, for more than 60 years in row.   No matter how badly Detroit Democrats did for their city, they kept control of it because they catered to the city’s most important voting blocks:  the unions and the poor, who wanted the money to keep coming.

         For this ongoing municipal travesty, Detroit voters have no one to blame but themselves.  Rather than judging the regime by its dismal results, they judged it by their own selfish concerns and by the regime’s mere stated intentions, as if those stated intentions were reliable and true and as if good intentions were ever a suitable substitute for good policies.  If your schools do not work, if the police take, on average, an hour to respond to a 911 call, if your favorite politicians get caught in scandals of various sorts time and again, then you need to change your vote.

         I’m talking to you, Detroit. 

         When outside entities, like the state of Michigan, came in to help the city out by taking on some of its financial burdens in order to operate traditional money losers like parks, Detroit voters, following the paranoid delusions of their race-baiting city leaders, resisted the offers, insisting that the state and other allegedly white-controlled entities simply wanted to steal things from Detroit.  Count on it:  If you vote on the basis of racial conspiracy theories, then you will vote self-destructively.

         The chickens, as the say, have come home to roost.  Detroit is the chicken coop.  It is now what it has been for years, perhaps decades:  It is incapable of self-rule.  It has gotten so bad that I suspect it might have to be disbanded and re-incorporated by fragments into other cites or else into the county or state at large.  Nothing less seems to offer any hope for the future.  Detroit voters cannot be trusted.  They vote for welfare programs and for union advantage, however unsustainable those things actually are.  Majority rule does not magically transform electoral nonsense into wisdom.  Detroit voters vote nonsense. 

         Speaking of political nonsense:  Just this week, several television talking heads said that Detroit’s failure was the result of government being too small.  I kid you not.  They think that if you can’t pay for the government you have, just make it bigger.  I can say nothing to such prodigious nonsense but this:  If you have no connection to reality, do not expect it to support your stupid views and do not expect to learn from reality when it proves you wrong.  The greatest municipal failure in history will not prevail to teach some folks this simple dystopic equation:  Unions +Democrats = Detroit.  Detroit = the greatest municipal failure in history.

         I could put it in a sentence:  If you want Detroit automakers to make a comeback, pray that the UAW makes inroads with foreign car makers.

         Those car makers are praying just the opposite, which is why, when they make cars here in America, they flock to right-to-work states, the list of which Michigan has recently joined.

         You can’t fix Detroit’s municipal ailments with casinos, with tax transfers, or with bigger government programs.  You cannot.  Government is not the fix in Detroit; government is the problem.  You can’t fix this problem by restructuring because no matter what structure you put in place bad political and economic policy will ruin it.  You fix it only by addressing what is wrong:  (1) unrestrained union greed and (2) the dissolution of the urban black family and the leftist political incentive system that dissolves it, to which I now turn.

         (2) Detroit and Welfare

         For more than 2000 years since Aristotle, we have known that whatever undermines the family undermines the culture.   Welfare payments, which drive fathers out of the home, do just that.  Those payments leave black youngsters without the fathers they need to provide the food, money, guidance, shelter, and examples that keep them on the straight and narrow.

         But welfare payments are predicated on the absence of father figures.   Consider this:  if you are a poor black young woman in the inner city who is living at home with your parents, and if you want personal freedom and the money that makes it possible, if you want a housing allowance, food subsidies, and medical attention, then have a child out of wedlock.   If you want more money, have more children -- but only by another man.  If your children are all by the same man, then the welfare bureaucracy thinks there’s a man around who ought to be footing these bills, and your checks will stop.  In short, they pay you to have children outside marriage.  The more children you have, the more money you get. 

         But sensible people know that poverty circles around broken homes, especially homes where the chief breadwinner is a woman with multiple children to support.  If you want to be poor, have lots of children outside wedlock.  In Detroit, more than 70% of the children in the black urban underclass are born outside wedlock, with no father around to support and guide them.  If you lack a father, your chances of dropping out of school sky rocket; your chances of taking drugs sky rocket; your chances of going to prison sky rocket; and your chances of having children who live the same desperate life you did sky rocket.

         It’s an incentive system from Hell.  When you pay folks to do the very things that make them poor in the first place, poor they will remain.  Remember this rule of political economy:  you get (A) more of what you subsidize and (B) less of what you tax.  Democrats subsidize illegitimacy, and more illegitimacy is what they get.  Illegitimacy is the handmaid of poverty.  In Detroit, illegitimacy is what they pay for.  In Detroit, it’s what they get, the result being countless folks locked into intergenerational poverty.  You do no favor for folks by turning them into mere wards of the state, generation after generation.  But you do keep them dependent upon government and keep yourself in political power, which seems to be the real purpose of such destructive government programs, whether they are aimed at the poor or the unions.

         That’s what leftists subsidize.  What do the leftists tax?  They tax prosperity.  They soak the rich, which means they drive away successful business owners, the only ones who have proved they are capable of making a profit and providing jobs for others, even in the hostile conditions provided by Detroit.       

         Here’s the headline:  Dystopia comes to Michigan.

         Watch out.  It’s coming to Illinois also; not just to Chicago but to the whole state.  After that, Washington, DC.

         Then we’re sunk, unless you change the way you vote.

         I’m talking to you, America.                           

A Non-religious Case Against Same Sex Marriage

 

You might recall the awful option faced by the title character in “Sophie’s Choice:” Pick one child or the other.  It’s not a choice any mother wants to make.  No matter what she chooses, her loss is unutterable.

Nor would any child want to make the same choice in reverse:  “Mommy or Daddy, Sally.  Pick one.”

But that is the ugly position into which same-sex marriage plunges children, except that the children themselves do not get to choose.  Someone else chooses for them.

No matter what you might think about same-sex marriage, we know this:  Any child raised under a same-sex union faces a tremendous loss -- either no Mommy or no Daddy.  In a union where two men or two women are involved, that’s always the outcome.  When Mommy picks a woman or Daddy picks a man as a life partner, the children always lose something enormously valuable and irreplaceable:  a mother or a father. 

That loss often has tragic consequences for a child.  If, for example, you are raised in a home with no father around, the odds that you will drop out of school, that you will take or sell drugs, that you will go to prison, that you will be poor, and that your children will suffer the same fate you did all skyrocket.  That same cycle of hopelessness and crime follows upon the absence of a mother.

When Mommy has sex with another woman, it doesn’t make that other woman a Daddy.  Having sex with Mommy doesn’t make you a Daddy any more than drinking milk makes you a calf.

The point here is not remotely homophobic.  The point here is not that Mommy and her lover, or Daddy and his, are to be shunned, much less hated.  The point here is that mothers and fathers are fundamentally important to the development of children, and therefore to the future of the nation, which depends upon the development and maturation of the next generation.  That works best when children have both a father and a mother.

         I say so because, according to a recent groundbreaking study by University of Texas scholar Mark Regnerus, we discover this (as summarized by The Family research Council):

         Compared to children who were raised in intact homes with both the biological father and mother present to raise them, the children of homosexual parents grow up to:
• Be Much more likely to receive welfare
• Have lower educational attainment
• Report more ongoing "negative impact" from their family of origin
• Be more likely to suffer from depression
• Have been arrested more often
• (If they are female) Have had more sexual partners--both male and female
 
         If they were the children of lesbian mothers, they are
 
• More likely to be currently cohabiting
• Almost 4 times more likely to be currently on public assistance
• Less likely to be currently employed full-time
• More than 3 times more likely to be unemployed
• Nearly 4 times more likely to identify as something other than entirely heterosexual
• Three times as likely to have had an affair while married or cohabiting
• An astonishing 10 times more likely to have been "touched sexually by a parent or other adult caregiver."
• Nearly 4 times as likely to have been "physically forced" to have sex against their will
• More likely to have "attachment" problems related to the ability to depend on others
• Use marijuana more frequently
• Smoke more frequently
• Have more often pled guilty to a non-minor offense

        None of these dire statistics seem to have much weight with the same sex marriage crowd.  Rather, they argue that marriage equality is rooted in human equality.  But that bogus argument does not work.  It moves illogically from one kind of equality to another.  The equality of all persons does not equal the equality of all lifestyles or all relationships.  For example, the mere fact that all persons are created equal does not mean that polygamy or incestual marriage ought therefore to be made legal.  You cannot move logically from the equality of persons to the equality of actions, choices, lifestyles, or relationships.  It simply does not follow.

        Same sex marriage advocates also argue that it is wrong to make value judgment about marriage.  Yet they allow themselves to make value judgments about who should get to marry.  Here again they fail logically.  By insisting that same sex unions ought to be considered marriages on a par with heterosexual marriages, they make a value judgment about marriages, both their own marriages and those of others.  If they are against making value judgments about marriage, then they have to stop saying what they say.  But of course they won't.  Rather, they press their judgments on others while, at the same time, refusing to permit others to make judgments.
        Let me clarify a point often misunderstood:  I am not saying that marriages without children are not marriages.  I never once said that or meant that.  I am saying that marriage and family go usually together.  I am talking about a common connection between marriage and family, not a necessary pre-condition for marriage.  Marriage and family are simply the usual mechanism of creating and nurturing the next generation.  But in the case of a homosexual union, that is naturally impossible.  And if you try to grant them by some other means the children nature denies them, then the children are statistically more likely to suffer bad consequences as a result, which is not the case with a heterosexual marriage.  Or, put differently, my wife and I have no children as yet.   I obviously do not argue that we have no marriage.  If we had children, it wouldn't as likely damage the children involved as would being raised by two men or two women, a situation that entails the significant loss of either mommy or daddy.  In short, wise governments and wise citizens do well always to remember that important and basic fact of life and to avoid making laws that undermine the traditional family and traditional family roles, which serve us and our offspring best. 
      The next time you consider the wisdom and propriety of same sex marriage, ask yourself this:  Which parent ought children do without, mommy or daddy?