Wednesday, September 25, 2013

City Government Detroit Style - Force More Businesses To Close Down!



You would think that in a bankrupt city where the population is fleeing and the tax base is imploding, the city government would be doing its best to encourage small businesses and economic activity.

Not in Detroit!

Instead, the city government is doing its very best to harass and shake down small businesses that have managed to survive the deluge, while making it as arcane and difficult for new businesses to open their doors as possible.

I've said this before, but it bears repeating. Detroit wasn't killed by the decline of industry, or an economic downturn. The decline began in the 1970's after five term mayor Coleman Young, a former member of the Communist Party and the National Negro Labor Council, a communist front group Young started with Soviet agent Paul Robeson was elected. Once the self designated 'chief mutha f***er in charge' and a compliant, mostly black and entirely Democrat city council took over, they proceeded to milk the city dry with a combination racial politics, corruption and and unfettered rule by Democrats and the public employee unions. 

Young essentially presiding over the city's decline. By the end of his fifth term, the population of Detroit had shrunk by more than half as middle class taxpayers and businesses fled, the school system became dysfunctional, and taxes skyrocketed along with the crime rate.

When Mayor Young's close friend and political adviser William L. Hart was convicted for stealing $2.6 million from city funds and when other Young cronies in the police department, school boards, sanitation, and other departments took the fall in what the FBI called 'a large circle of corruption surrounding the mayor', a substantial amount of the evidence they used was from wiretaps on Mayor Young's own home telephone.

The only reason he stayed out of jail is because the Carter Justice Department didn't want to indict a popular black Democrat mayor and risk antagonizing a reliable voting bloc.

Young's successors like Kwame Kilpatrick, now a guest of the State of Michigan continued this legacy on steroids, if not the same ability to get away with it.

Here's the politically incorrect truth. You could flood Detroit with public bail out money and pay off all the city's creditors, but in a few years Detroit would be in exactly the same predicament and be howling for more. To 'fix ' Detroit (if it's even possible) you'd have to get rid of the city's dysfunctional governing class and the mindset they bring with them - and probably a lot of the sort of people that have continued to vote for them while the city they live in fell apart around them.

3 comments:

louielouie said...

is it possible to force canada to take detroit?

Rob said...

I doubt we could force them. We'd have to pay them.

B.Poster said...

Why would Canada want Detroit? Even if we could force them to take it, that would be unethical. After all they are supposed to be our friends. I don't friends force bad investments on friends.

Detroit should be allowed to crater. Bad decisions begat bad results. It's really not very hard. Once the folks who made the bad decisions are forced to live with the consequences of those decisions then and only then could we expect change. As long as they never have to realize the consequences for those decisions, we should expect no real change.

A prominent commentator once said to paraphrase his quote. "Part of government's job is to protect us from our mistakes." Since the government is the people, essentially what this means is others should have to bear some of the pain resulting from my mistakes.

At best it would be unethical to expect someone else who did not make those mistakes to bear any portion of the brunt of my mistakes. At worst and much more likely such thinking is warped and evil. As such, it would unethical of Detroit to expect a bail out and it would be foolhardy in the highest extreme for someone to extend it to them.

I see two possibilities. 1.)Simply allow it to crater as the end result of bad decisions. Then start fresh. People could only be expected to change behavior if they have to face the consequences of bad choices. Bailing it only prolongs the agony and makes the ultimate fall that much worse.

2.)Sell of Detroit's assets at a "fire sale" and use the proceeds to settle with the creditors. Then the new owners of the properties can make the changes that are needed, however, this will have to entail the government getting out of the way of the new property owners.

After all whose dumber the creditors who lent the funds or the borrower who borrowed them? In this case, I'd say it is probably the creditors who were/are the dumbest in these transactions. Perhaps if they have to bear the consequences of such lending practices, they might be more prudent when extending credit in the future.