“Sometimes the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.”

Louis Woodhill on Detroit:

[T]he big lie that drove Detroit into bankruptcy is liberalism itself. 

The great strength of liberalism is that it attempts to address the real problems of ordinary people. The great weakness of liberalism is that its “solutions” are based upon lies, double standards, and wishful thinking. 

The main reason that, in Detroit, per capita income is so low and crime rates are so high is that more and more of Detroit’s remaining population consists of members of America’s urban underclass. Most of the people fleeing Detroit have been productive, taxpaying citizens. 

Liberal programs created America’s urban underclass, and they perpetuate it by encouraging and sustaining a breathtaking progressive social innovation called the “zero parent family.” 

In a zero parent family, there is no one that has demonstrated, by fully meeting adult responsibilities (including paying his or her own way in the world), that he or she is a functioning adult. 

Progressives favor using taxpayer money to incentivize children to have children, and then using more taxpayer money to sustain the zero parent family units that get created. In this way, old-fashioned, married, functioning adult fathers and mothers get replaced by welfare programs and occasional visits from government social workers. 

To believe in 1960 that people would ignore government incentives to form zero parent families was wishful thinking. To assert the same thing in 2013 is a lie. 

Liberals believe that government spending matters, and that the incentives facing private sector decision makers do not matter. Present day Detroit is a monument to the folly of this progressive position. 

Should Detroit be bailed out? No. Like Greece, Detroit actually can’t be bailed out, because its economy is shrinking. A money-losing enterprise with declining revenues can’t support any debt at all. 

Detroit’s productive citizens have been running for the hills (in this case, Bloomfield Hills), and they have been taking Detroit’s tax base with them. If this exodus is not stopped, nothing else will make any difference. 

Detroit should do now what Greece should have done in 2009: suspend debt payments, and cut taxes and regulations to restore economic growth. In addition, Detroit must at the same time (somehow) cut its crime rate by about 80% and turn around its failed schools.
Is it likely that all of these things will happen? No. The most likely outcome is that Detroit will continue to sink into the liberal/progressive dystopian ooze, while its remaining productive citizens take their human and financial capital and flee. 

There is a great “Demotivators” poster whose caption is, “Sometimes the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.” With Detroit serving as a shining example of the end result of liberal/progressive policies, we have definitely been warned.

The problem with liberalism is that it is not self-limiting. Liberalism creates crime, social disintegration, and moral chaos.

Crime, social disintegration, and moral chaos provide the pretext for more liberalism.

Ralph Cloward and Frances Fox Piven understood.

Liberalism crushes civilization, and then uses the debris as fuel.