Fellow Michiganian Michael Barone explains why he went from “liberal” to conservative:
Cavanagh was bright, young, liberal, and charming. He had been elected in 1961 at age 33 with virtually unanimous support from blacks and with substantial support from white homeowners—then the majority of Detroit voters—and he was reelected by a wide margin in 1965. He and Martin Luther King, Jr., led a civil rights march of 100,000 down Woodward Avenue in June 1963. He was one of the first mayors to set up an antipoverty program and believed that city governments could do more than provide routine services; they could lift people, especially black people, out of poverty and into productive lives. Liberal policies promised to produce something like heaven. Instead they produced something more closely resembling hell. You can get an idea of what happened to Detroit by looking at some numbers. The Census counted 1,849,568 people in Detroit in 1950, including me. It counted 713,777 in 2010.
To get a feel for what this particular hell is like, you should read Charlie LeDuff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy…
His book opens as he notices in the ice at the bottom of an elevator shaft in one of Detroit’s many, many abandoned buildings the feet of a corpse. We see him having a drink with Council President Pro Tem Monica Conyers, the congressman’s wife who later went to jail for bribery—and stopping off before to see the 13-year-old girl who, while attending a council session, criticized Conyers for calling the council president “Shrek.” He makes the mistake of stopping for gas on the east side (“semi-lawless and crazy”) and escapes being robbed by two goons when he pulls a gun from his glove compartment. He hangs out with honest guys whose job is to cope with the city’s violent murders and arson-set fires—”murder dick” Mike Carlisle; firefighters Mike Nevin, who is unjustly sacked, and Walt Harris, who says grace at firehouse meals and dies in a fire set by an arsonist for $20. Detroit is no longer the nation’s murder capital—though, LeDuff notes, police officials systematically undercount homicides—and Halloween is no longer Devil’s Night (with 810 arsons in 1984). But the good guys are fighting uphill. City and county buildings are dilapidated; firemen have to bring their own toilet paper to work and don’t have water pressure to put out a fire set in their own firehouse; the morgue doesn’t have room for all the bodies.
Dan Austin’s Lost Detroit (2010), a book highlighting a dozen of the city’s abandoned architectural landmarks, shows photos of the old Packard plant, closed since 1956, where young men drive cars to the top and then pitch them to the ground, trees growing inside what were once downtown office buildings, and a grand 1920s downtown theater whose interior is now used as a parking lot (without many cars). LeDuff helps you see the rot. As he goes about his rounds he shows you “neck-high grass that went ignored and the garbage heaps that went uncollected,” “sewers backed up into houses,” and the disgusting disrepair of public buildings.
Socialism never works, really, but the anti-science Left always returns to it, because many see it as a route to power, and there is a flaw in human nature to which it irrationally appeals for the uneducated.
Another reason folks on the left, especially young and idealistic ones, gravitate to socialism is that it feels good. The theory that the government can create and keep a utopia sounds like a great idea. The problem is that it is based on an unstated (and mostly unobtainable) prerequisite: People will work harder for less pay/food/shelter and be OK with others who don’t work as hard (or at all) getting more pay/food/shelter for the system to actually work. That part isn’t discussed in polite (liberal) society.
In early 2011, my wife and I toured several Asian countries including Vietnam. While their government is officially communist, they are some of the most capitalistic people I’ve ever seen. It seemed that everyone was trying to create and sell something.
While riding on a tour bus, our guide was telling us about his country. His words, as precisely as I can recall, were, “Following reunification in 1975, we were a socialist country. You know what socialism is? It’s where if I work hard and you don’t, we both get the same. So no one worked hard. About 20 years ago, the government changed the rules. Now if you work hard, you get more. Things are much better now.”
Just watched Atlas Shrugged Part 2 the other night. Once I got past the fact that they changed out the cast (I really liked the first Dagney), it was again refreshing to see how true to the text they’ve kept. The story of the 20th Century Motorworks’s demise is particularly appropriate to this discussion. Socialism/communism always fail. They are incompatible with human nature.
Getting paid more has little relation with working hard on a real world capitalist system as well. The main difference is how the wealth is redistributed and to whom the wealth is redistributed.
The labor movement is responsible for a lot of things and those include switching from working up to 16 hours a day, 6 days a week in the XIXth century to the current standard. So excuse me for not falling into the capitalist utopia.
It wasn’t the unions that made Henry Ford pay far more money for his workers than the competition. It was the rapid turnover as poorly paid workers jumped to jobs at other companies whenever they could make slightly more money or get slightly more benefits.
Competition for workers by employers was the biggest driving factor behind increased pay and better conditions.
Then please explain why salaries in the US haven’t kept up with GDP growth since the 1970s. The truth is salaries have little to do with generated wealth, let alone how much you work.
Gee, what else happened in the 70s..
Few Americans, and certainly very very few young Americans have given thought to where stuff comes from, how complex the economic system really is, and why it’s impossible to run an economy via centralized control.
The story of how a pencil is made never crosses their mind. And all their lives the plentitude of stuff just magically appears. Certainly someone seated in an office with a green visor is making all this happen no? They also maintain the certainty that the stuff will just keep on appearing magically no matter what you do. The connection of cause and effect is lost upon them.
While they are quite prepared to believe in Evolution without a deity, and accept the fact that such a complex ecosystem works itself out, they are unaware that the economic system is quite similar in many ways. And they mistrust the idea that all will be well if you let economic nature take it’s course. That is a hard sell.
Added to that, you have the young’s uber idealistic notion of plenty for all; a bred-in (not inbred but actively nurtured and cultivated by the Left) enviousness of rich people which is morphed into demonization by an ever-braying Left who know how uneducated the young’uns are (because the Lefties saw to that). Of course, the young never stop to notice that the Lefties telling them all this stuff are, themselves, vastly rich…..
So given all of this, the Story of the Pencil is lost upon them – even if they ever hear of it – but the Story of Julie resonates.
They also are prey to the money fallacy – that if only people have more money, they can have everything they want. This perspective comes about because it works for an individual, whose economic mass is negligible, and the extra money gives him comparative economic advantage. It doesn’t work with the entire population as a whole, because there is nothing against which to gain comparative advantage.
It is not impossible to run an economy via centralized control. It is just inefficient. For all the warts the Soviet Union had it managed to survive for nearly a century on a planned economy. The thing is given a world with limited resources your economy will eventually lose against competing economies which use a market model. A planned economy works great for solving well known problems (e.g. creating heavy industry in a backwards rural nation) but cannot predict and adapt to new trends properly. Or even worse. Central commands may create negative incentives to a nascent industry because of poor modeling. In the Soviet Union for a long time there was a stigma against cybernetics (i.e. computers) and genetics. This was inconsequential for a long time but eventually it became a problem. Furthermore their downfall was arguably caused by a drop in oil extraction and production at the same time the rest of the world was enjoying historically low oil prices. This meant they could no longer support tremendously wasteful practices. I will give you one example. After Khrushchev drained the Aral Sea, in one of his misguided efforts to plant cotton in the desert using irrigation, the Aral receded to a degree that it became impossible to fish there anymore. In order not to lose the manufacturing jobs in a local canned fish factory the State started transporting fish from the Pacific Ocean to that plant near the Aral Sea. Basically they were transporting the fish from the Pacific to Kazakhstan. Try looking at a map to see how far away that is.
“It is not impossible to run an economy via centralized control. It is just inefficient.”
Ok agreed. I should not have used the word “impossible” unless it was followed by “efficiently”.
If you don’t grasp how wealth is created (not -personal- wealth, but wealth-entering-the-system), then everything seems very zero-sum. And latching on ‘fair distribution’ becomes appealing.
The wild thing is that so many of the methods to -do- “fair distribution” are fundamentally just wealth-destroying.
Detroit’s problems are not due to its government’s left-wing policies. Pittsburgh has been a Lefty town since the 1930s and it’s doing fine.
Compare Detroit today to Detroit prior to, oh, say 1964. What has changed about the city? Is it better now, or worse?
Then do the same with Philly.
Cleveland.
Baltimore.
Cincinnati.
Gary.
Chicago.
Newark.
Trenton.
Atlanta.
Birmingham.
Montgomery.
Saint Louis.
…and the list goes on and on.
Now ask yourself two questions:
1. What one factor changed in the above-named cities since 1964?
2. What one factor do they have in common today?
The answer is obvious. But we dare not acknowledge it. Because an honest look at the reality of America’s cities leads us to conclusions that we cannot allow ourselves to face.
Portland, Seattle, and other big cities are every bit as dominated by the Left as is Detroit. Yet they thrive, while the erstwhile Motor City decays into hell. Why?
An honest answer to that question can only lead to Trouble. Better to look away and find some other, more palatable answer.
But the truth about America’s cities is what it is. And until we face it, as ugly and as unpleasant as it is, things will only get worse — in Detroit, and in your own home town.
You may all call me a hater now.
I will not call you a hater; I will call you someone with the intellectual standards of an environmentalist.
Instead of calling me names, you should think about what I have to say. An honest examination of reality, unfiltered through preconceived notions of Acceptable Thought, will not fail to reveal the same conclusion.
Names? The names in this case were simply a shorthand for pointing the resemblance between HBD and BD. It’s almost as though you had the reply already written and posted it irrespective of its appropriateness.
Besides, since when do “Acceptable Thought” fans regard BD as a dubious concept?
My theory is that it’s due to domination by one labor union. In such a town, people will blame business for anything that goes wrong, which means it will not be put right.
This might also explain West Virginia’s stagnation.