From article: Detroit’s Death By Democracy About government employees’ unions living parasitically on Detroit, and their collaborators in the political class, the question is: What. Were. They. Thinking? Well, how did Bernie Madoff or the Enron executives convince themselves their houses of cards would never collapse? Here democracy ratified a double delusion: Magic would rescue the city, or Washington would deem Detroit, as it recently did some banks and two of the three Detroit-based automobile companies, “too big to fail.” And not even Washington is oblivious to the minefield of moral hazard it would stride into if it rescued this city and, then inevitably, others that are buckling beneath the weight of their cumulative follies. It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. This bedraggled city’s decay poses worrisome questions about the viability of democracy in jurisdictions where big government and its unionized employees collaborate in pillaging taxpayers. Auto industry executives continually bought labor peace by mortgaging their companies’ futures in surrenders to union demands. Then city officials gave their employees pay scales comparable to those of autoworkers. Steven Rattner, who administered the bailout of the Detroit-based portion of America’s automobile industry, says, “Apart from voting in elections, the 700,000 remaining residents of the Motor City are no more responsible for Detroit’s problems than were the victims of Hurricane Sandy for theirs.” Congress, he says, should bail out Detroit because “America is just as much about aiding those less fortunate as it is about personal responsibility.” There you have today’s liberalism: Human responsibility is denied. The restoration of America’s vitality depends in big part on avoiding the bottomless sinkhole that would be created by the federal government rescuing one-party cities, and one-party states such as Illinois, from the consequences of unchecked power. The consequences of such power — incompetence, magical thinking, cynicism and sometimes criminality — are written in Detroit’s ruins.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Aug 2013 17:49:00 +0000
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