Mark Steyn on the end of Detroit

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http://www.nationalreview.com/node/353959/print

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By the time Detroit declared bankruptcy, Americans were so inured to the throbbing dirge of Motown’s Greatest Hits — 40 percent of its streetlamps don’t work; 210 of its 317 public parks have been permanently closed; it takes an hour for police to respond to a 9-1-1 call; only a third of its ambulances are driveable; one-third of the city has been abandoned; the local realtor offers houses on sale for a buck and still finds no takers; etc., etc. — Americans were so inured that the formal confirmation of a great city’s downfall was greeted with little more than a fatalistic shrug.

But it shouldn’t be. To achieve this level of devastation, you usually have to be invaded by a foreign power. In the War of 1812, when Detroit was taken by a remarkably small number of British troops without a shot being fired, Michigan’s Governor Hull was said to have been panicked into surrender after drinking heavily. Two centuries later, after an almighty 50-year bender, the city surrendered to itself. The tunnel from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit, Michigan, is now a border between the First World and the Third World — or, if you prefer, the developed world and the post-developed world. To any American time-transported from the mid 20th century, the city’s implosion would be literally incredible: Were he to compare photographs of today’s Hiroshima with today’s Detroit, he would assume Japan won the Second World War after nuking Michigan. Detroit was the industrial powerhouse of America, the “arsenal of democracy,” and in 1960 the city with the highest per capita income in the land. Half a century on, Detroit’s population has fallen by two-thirds, and in terms of “per capita income,” many of the shrunken pool of capita have no income at all beyond EBT cards. The recent HBO series Hung recorded the adventures of a financially struggling Detroit school basketball coach forced to moonlight as a gigolo. It would be heartening to think the rest of the bloated public-sector work force, whose unsustainable pensions and benefits have brought Detroit to its present sorry state (and account for $9 billion of its $11 billion in unsecured loans), could be persuaded to follow its protagonist and branch out into the private sector, but this would probably be more gigolos than the market could bear, even allowing for an uptick in tourism from Windsor.

So, late on Friday, some genius jurist struck down the bankruptcy filing. Judge Rosemarie Aquilina declared Detroit’s bankruptcy “unconstitutional” because, according to the Detroit Free Press, “the Michigan Constitution prohibits actions that will lessen the pension benefits of public employees.” Which means that, in Michigan, reality is unconstitutional.....

long article...

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@gungasnake,

Yup, you just can't beat trickle down economics.

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Illustrated Version...

http://www.realverse.com/detroit-michigan-americas-new-face/

http://www.realverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/real-verse-democrats-killed-Detroit.jpg

40 Years of demoKKKrat rule....

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http://www.realverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Detroit-real-verse.jpg

http://www.realverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/real-verse-liberals-killed-Detroit.jpg

http://www2.vmi.edu/academics/mech/mcmastersrl/photo/detroit07.jpg

Beautiful theater some 60 years ago...

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When you build **** products and your world wide competitors build great products, this is the inevitable result.

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@JTT,

There have been no major quality problems with US cars for at least a couple of decades now. Detroit's problems are much bigger than that:

http://www.newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty506.htm

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more...

http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3046440/posts

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http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3048212/posts

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It doesn't seem to be caused by any failure of US auto makers or their products. Pretty much everything I read indicates that the reign of Coleman Young as mayor drove all productive people out of the city.

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MEDIA LEAVES OUT ONE IMPORTANT POLITICALLY INCORRECT FACT ABOUT DETROIT
http://angrywhitedude.com/2013/07/media-leaves-out-one-important-politically-incorrect-fact-about-detroit/#JOCy6BwhzgRTRZZV.99

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@Pamela Rosa,

You can't just blow up the safety nets at a stroke, the consequences would be totally unpredictable.

What you COULD do, in theory at least, would be to replace our present (stupid and destructive) welfare programs with programs which were intelligent and non-destructive, and to my thinking the key ingredient would have to be that while you might provide food and shelter to those in need, you would never provide anybody with money. There would be an understanding that money and choices come only from work.

But you'd have to do a number of things at roughly the same time. You'd have to break the power of he NEA and get rid of public schools. You'd have to bring manufacturing back to the US. You'd have to revitalize the US economy which means breaking the strangle-hold of the Gaea-worshipers. You'd have to make major efforts to take all of the money and glamor out of crime, get rid of the "War on Drugs", get rid of pawn shops etc.

Aside from everything else you have the horrible conundrum that black women appear to be making it in America while black men are failing. That simply has to be a cultural problem and not a racial or genetic problem.

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Maybe a large corporation or a conglomerate of corporations could buy and privatize Detroit. Maybe privatize all the public sector jobs and fix the city that way.

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@McGentrix,

Want a plan to fix detroit? Try this:

http://www.freemansperspective.com/detroit/

Quote:

The news is full of stories of Detroit, and understandably so. It’s an unmitigated disaster. But I know how to fix it.

Seriously, I do!

I have a plan that would cost the state of Michigan nothing – not a cent. It wouldn’t cost DC anything either, and it would turn Detroit into the most thriving city in North America. As a bonus, it would give the remaining property owners in Detroit a financial windfall.

Here’s the plan:

The federal government (in writing) forbears taxes, regulations, laws, and impositions for a hundred years to the area of the current municipality of Detroit and to all persons and commercial entities resident there.

The government of the state of Michigan forbears taxes, regulations, laws, and impositions for a hundred years to the area of the current municipality of Detroit and to all persons and commercial entities resident there.

All municipal government agencies within Detroit are disbanded.

All state and federal offices within the city of Detroit are disbanded.

The federal government guarantees that entry and exit to/from Detroit will remain unchanged from the current conditions, and that no obligations will be placed upon residents of Detroit in any other place.

Federal and state governments immediately cease all payments to residents of Detroit. (They may resume payment to those persons if and when they are no longer resident in Detroit.)

The final legal document would be more complex than this, but those are all the main points necessary.

What this plan does is to return Detroit to its natural state – to the way it was managed when the first settlers arrived. (In other words, not managed at all.)

And think of the money that will be saved by Michigan and the feds. Billions per year.

And Then…

And then we have a free for all… and a good one. Think of Hong Kong, but easy to get to.

Businesses would begin to relocate the next morning. Hundreds of them, thousands of them. The people who still owned and lived in their homes would be offered lots of money for their properties.

Libertarians and conservatives, disgusted by the gang in DC, would load up and drive to Detroit. Productive former residents would return. Thousands of opportunity-seekers, anarcho-capitalists, and pot-smoking hippies would be gathering their money and buying property.

Detroit would, within only a few years, become the coolest city on the planet – by FAR.

But, But…

“But there won’t be any police!”

“There won’t be any courts!”

“It will be non-stop murder, death, and mayhem!”

You wanna bet? Do ya? (And you don’t think Detroit has non-stop mayhem already?)

The people who come to Detroit would be coming to escape from their chains and to be productive. These are precisely the kinds of people who clean up a town. And with no taxes to pay for a hundred years, they’d have plenty of extra money to spend on whatever services (security or otherwise) that they wanted.

The Truth

The truth, of course, is that the state and fed guvs will never agree to a plan like this one, for a single reason:

Because they fear it would succeed.

They’ll let every last person in Detroit rot before they’ll let a group of producers live free of their chains.

Detroit returned to its natural state would expose the great lie of the government game – that we can’t survive without them.

Paul Rosenberg
FreemansPerspective.com

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@gungasnake,

gungasnake wrote:

Want a plan to fix detroit? Try this:

Quote:

...

Here’s the plan:

The federal government (in writing) forbears taxes, regulations, laws, and impositions for a hundred years to the area of the current municipality of Detroit and to all persons and commercial entities resident there.
...

Federal and state governments immediately cease all payments to residents of Detroit. (They may resume payment to those persons if and when they are no longer resident in Detroit.)

Yeah, that sounds like a great deal for Detroit residents. (I'm not being sarcastic; it really does.) Make as much money as you want and pay nothing into the federal system, and then, when you go belly-up, crawl back into the rest of the United States and sponge off the federal system.

It makes no more sense for the rest of the United States to support such a "free city" than it would make for a private insurance company to start insuring people without charging them a premium.

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@Kolyo,

The plan would shut down all federal money TO the place as well as From it for a hundred years. The net cost to the federal govt would be zero, the city would in fact recover, and there would be a gain in revenue to the govt. from taxing commerce enabled by the recovery of the place. Right now, the place has to be a huge drain on tax dollars.

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Mark Steyn on the end of Detroit

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