Rich Lowery illustrates in just a few short paragraphs why liberalism is a terrible philosophy by which to govern. Many of our major cities are disaster areas, like New Orleans but without the hurricane, and almost every one of them is managed by liberal Democrats. Lowery focusses on just one particularly egregious example, Detroit.
Detroit suffers from every possible malady except a plague of locusts, and that's only because they find urban living uncongenial. The city has a revitalized downtown, but all around it, the city rots. Forbes magazine declared Detroit "America's Most Miserable City," on the basis of its unemployment and crime rates, among other things. The unemployment rate of 8.2 percent is the highest of any major urban area in the nation, and its homicide rate is higher than New York's in the bad old days of the early 1990s.
The city has lost 1 million residents since 1950. It was hit by the decline of the auto industry and white flight, fueled partly by racism. These trends would have rocked the city no matter what. Detroit compounded them with disastrous governance, personified by Mayor Coleman Young, who held office for 20 years beginning in 1974.
His record raises the question why, if it wanted to engage in a nefarious plot to hurt blacks, the federal government would invent the AIDS virus when it could simply emplace mayors like Coleman Young instead. "Imagine a Rev. Jeremiah Wright with real power," says urban expert Fred Siegel. Coleman taunted suburbanites, accusing them of "pillaging the city," while his scandal-plagued administration managed the city into the ground.
Read the rest at the link for which thanks are due to Jason for passing it along.
To Lowery's column we might add the recent news that seventeen of the nation's 50 largest cities had high school graduation rates less than 50 percent, with the lowest rates reported in Detroit, Indianapolis and Cleveland.
Nevertheless, the people of these cities keep electing the same party to run the schools despite their abject and catastrophic failure. It would be amusing were it not so tragic.
RLC
