The problem goes beyond Ferguson, and beyond police abuse. Zoning regulations make housing scarce and expensive, blocking economic growth by starving businesses of workers. Silly licensing regulations for hairdressers and interior decorators keep lower-income people from finding work that will help them climb the economic ladder. Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals dont address the problem because of their peculiar blind spots. > The paradoxical reality is that ending the most abusive practices of American government requires moving responsibility up the local-state-federal chain, which is the opposite of ingrained conservative impulses. And when national right-wing organizations do plunge into local politics, they generally attempt to replicate Washington-style conservatism. Rather than attack nefarious exercises of state power, they attack the most benign ones. A recent Center for American Progress report sums up incursions by the Koch network into state and local controversies: It is hard at work blocking tiny tax increases, preventing infrastructure maintenance, and shuttering zoos and community centers. Big Small Government is spared its ideological assault. > In larger cities, most or even all of the candidates running for municipal office are Democrats. And though Democrats are far more attuned than Republicans to police abuse, intra-Democratic politics is not optimized to root out most government failure. Democratic voters tend to apply an ideology shaped by high-profile national struggles to their local voting habits; they may, for instance, associate arguments against regulation with the sorts of spurious claims made by polluters, Wall Street, or other robber barons, even if Uber’s argument against intrusive regulations has vastly more merit than the coal industry’s. > The myth of localism is rooted deep in our political psyche. Left and right alike use small and local as terms of approbation, big and bureaucratic as terms of... click-to-read-mo.re/p/9lha/10000000
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 17:16:56 +0000
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