Detroit's
'One Party' State Killed It
Thursday,
August 1, 2013 11:04 AM
By: George
Will
In 1860, an
uneasy Charles Darwin confided in a letter to a friend: "I had no
intention to write atheistically" but "I cannot persuade myself that
a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae
with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of
caterpillars."
What appalled
him had fascinated entomologist William Kirby (1759-1850): The ichneumon insect
inserts an egg in a caterpillar, and the larva hatched from the egg, he said,
"gnaws the inside of the caterpillar, and though at last it has devoured
almost every part of it except the skin and intestines, carefully all this time
avoids injuring the vital organs, as if aware that its own existence
depends on that of the insect on which it preys!"
Government
employees' unions living parasitically on Detroit have been less aware than
ichneumon larvae. About them, 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, where
cattle could graze in vast swaths of this depopulated city, democracy ratified
a double delusion: Magic would rescue the city (consult the Bible, the bit
about the multiplication of the loaves and fishes), or Washington would deem
Detroit, as it recently did some banks and two of the three Detroit-based
automobile companies, "too big to fail."
But Detroit
failed long ago. And not even Washington, whose recklessness is almost
limitless, 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 no theological conundrum of the sort that
troubled Darwin, but it does pose worrisome questions about the viability of
democracy in jurisdictions where big government and its unionized employees
collaborate in pillaging taxpayers. Self-government has failed in what once was
America's fourth-largest city and now is smaller than Charlotte, N.C.
Detroit,
which boomed during World War II when industrial America was "the arsenal
of democracy," died of democracy. Today, among the exculpatory alibis
invoked to deflect blame from the political class and the docile voters who
empowered it, is the myth that Detroit is simply a victim of
"de-industrialization."
In 1950, however, Detroit and Chicago were comparable — except Detroit was
probably wealthier, as measured by per capita income. Chicago, too, lost
manufacturing jobs, to the American South, to south of the border, to South
Korea and elsewhere. But Chicago discerned the future and diversified. It is
grimly ironic that Chicago's iconic street is Michigan Avenue.
Detroit's
population, which is 62 percent smaller than in 1950, has contracted less than
the United Auto Workers membership, which was more than 1 million in 1950, and
now is around 390,000. Auto industry executives, who often were invertebrate
mediocrities, continually bought labor peace by mortgaging their companies'
futures in surrenders to union demands.
Then city
officials gave their employees — who have 47 unions, including one for crossing
guards — pay scales comparable to those of autoworkers. Thus did private-sector
decadence drive public-sector dysfunction — government negotiating with
government-employees' unions that are government organized as an interest group
to lobby itself to do what it wants to do: Grow.
Steven
Rattner, who administered the bailout of part 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 agency, hence responsibility, is denied. Apart
from the pesky matter of "voting in elections" — apart from decades
of voting to empower incompetents, scoundrels, and criminals, and to mandate
unionized rapacity — no one is responsible for anything. Popular sovereignty is
a chimera because impersonal forces akin to hurricanes are sovereign.
The
restoration of America's vitality depends on, among many other things, 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. Those consequences of such power —
incompetence, magical thinking, cynicism, and sometimes criminality — are
written in Detroit's ruins.
