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Chicago is a great city. I live in the suburbs. It has
many wonderful attractions, and justifiably still maintains a reputation
as "the city that works". Like any major city, it has its share of
problems, too. It deals with them through a system of one party
boss rule which is popularly dubbed "machine politics". |
| Mayor
Daley, like his father before him, has done a very commendable job
during his tenure. There is much which citizens can be very proud
about. He may not fit Plato's ideal of the benign philosopher king
who leads a Utopian republic with benevolent wisdom, but neither is he
Machiavelli's model prince. It works. The
streets get plowed. The trash gets picked up. You get ahead
by not making waves. Leaders maintain plausible deniability for
anything which might be perceived as unethical. If somebody gets
caught doing something improper, it's like that scene in Casablanca.
"I am shocked, shocked ..." You quickly round up the usual
suspects, throw them under the bus politically, and move on. |
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Our new President comes out of this environment. It was here
before he came to town, and it will still probably remain here long
after his tenure in office is just an interesting footnote in history
books. This is the eternal bureaucracy of which
President Reagan spoke. It is so deeply entrenched in the
political culture of Chicago that it is hard to imagine anything else.
Political change would be scary.
Whether or not it delivers an optimal solution for the
future of Chicago, everyone knows from childhood how the game is played
here. You don't fight City Hall. You go with the flow.
You don't rock the boat.
Chicagoans have managed to make this unusual model
work fairly well. It is not, however, a model which could be
repeated at the federal level without risking many serious threats to
our liberties. |
| Is
Chicago's success the product of this political machine, however, or
something which has survived in spite of it? What really makes
Chicago great? Is it the political leadership?
Is it the city and county bureaucracy, and what all of
those workers do? Is the state political leadership a factor, or
does Chicago still prosper in spite of whatever they may do in
Springfield?
Can the success of Chicago be attributed in any
significant way to any largesse of federal programs, or are their
distant mandates with limited local resources actually a burden on the
local machine? Will more "supportive" federal policies in response
to the needs of the city actually help to improve Chicago?
Does Chicago "work" and prosper in spite of the
government, or because of it? Experts disagree. |
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Consider the example of Detroit. It has also enjoyed liberal
leadership for almost as long as anyone alive today can remember.
It most certainly does not enjoy a reputation as the "city that works".
Instead, it enjoys a reputation as a shell of a city which largely
collapsed from within as businesses fled to the suburbs or to other
states. There have been many initiatives to "rebuild" Detroit.
Frankly, Chicago had many very similar problems 40 years ago.
Chicagoans worked to get over it. Detroit didn't succeed. |
| I'm
not picking on Detroit. There are many other examples of cities
around the country in which liberal policies have not worked to improve
their cities as intended. Lots of very sincere people with good
intentions tried very hard to turn Detroit and other cities around
through their program ideas. They failed.
Chicago is something of an aberration as the "city that works".
Like autocratic regimes in other countries, sometimes bosses actually do
good things to stay in power, rather than descend into obvious tyranny
and economic failure. If something wasn't working as expected,
then Chicago changed until it found something which did work.
Failure was not widely accepted as inevitable or somebody else's fault,
even though in some parts of the city the social problems were every bit
as bad as anywhere else. There were always new ideas for social
programs to meet every perceived need. Some actually worked. |
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point is that conservatives need to come up with better solutions to the
development needs of major American cities. It is not sufficient
to develop prosperous enclaves in the suburbs or other states, as though
we could build a wall to keep all of the liberals out and just abandon
them to their own fate. As in the case of the
Berlin Wall, rising economic disparity across local political borders is
not sustainable, no matter how ruthlessly one defends that border.
People migrate toward perceived opportunities for prosperity.
Surely the millions of illegal immigrants in this country should
demonstrate that. Where do they go? They don't just go where
they can find the best social welfare programs, even if they may be very
grateful for any free benefits which are accessible to them as a social
safety net. They come here in great numbers at great risk for a
larger dream than subsistence on government benefits.
The migration away from "blue" states toward "red"
states should tell you something. The flow of business investment
projects is another good indicator of people moving toward perceived
opportunities.
That doesn't mean no jobs are being created, nor
businesses started or attracted, in liberal states. The point is
that the net flow away from liberal states is pretty intuitively obvious
if you look at the facts.
Even a very attractive and formerly very prosperous
state like California has been losing businesses for years, and is now
hard pressed to afford all of the liberal spending which has grown
beyond control. The flow of business to more conservative states,
as in the South, is not just because they are "cheaper". There are
far cheaper places to do business around the world, or even in North
America. Their attraction is the potential to actually keep more
of the profits of a business venture, face fewer risks of rising social
program costs, and enjoy relative prosperity even on a much lower income
than in other states. The "cheaper" places are usually cheap for a
reason. They have their drawbacks, too. The point is that
the attraction is the potential to achieve sustainable prosperity there,
not simply exploit their cheapness.
Companies aren't just fleeing the labor unions which
have helped to bleed some industries to death. They are migrating
to where they perceive more opportunities to achieve sustainable
prosperity. They are migrating away from states where they
perceive exponential burdens of government spending - unless they expect
to become the beneficiaries of such spending. That's more like a
Ponzi scheme, in which jobs are created by redistributing tax revenues
until there's no more money left to sustain the con. |
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failure to bring sustainable prosperity to our major cities is a serious
economic threat to our country. Conservatives
need to be more actively engaged at the state, city, and local levels to
create more "cities which work". We need to spread that success as
an alternative to the endless cycle of federal, state, and city
government dependency in impoverished areas with costly social problems
they can't afford. |
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you scratch below the surface of liberal media bias in this country, you
will find that much of the success in a city like Chicago is really
driven by the countless businessmen, entrepreneurial ventures, and
philanthropic community leaders who work together to get things done.
It isn't really the political machine which drives the success of this
city. The success is driven by civic leaders in spite of the
burden of supporting an inefficient political machine bureaucracy and
whatever corruption costs exist. Chicago didn't
rise from the ashes of the Great Chicago Fire because of the political
leadership of that era, nor was it defined by the blatant corruption
which seemed inevitable later in the gangster era. It has grown
and prospered in spite of such burdens because the people of this city
worked to make it happen. |
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solutions which work are found by dedicated people working together
despite their differences to solve local problems and create better
communities. Voters don't really care very much about political
party philosophies. They care about the results which they see in
their communities and their own lives each day. If dependency on
government programs is the only reality which they have ever known from
childhood, then it is very hard to break that cycle of believing in
failure and accepting it as inevitable. |
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Instead of proliferating the mass destruction which has been wreaked on
so many cities through liberal programs despite their good intentions,
we need to make our cities globally competitive and attractive places
where people will have confidence in their own ability to create a
prosperous future for themselves. We need to be actively engaged
in the process of making all of our cities great again.
Other countries are developing great cities of the
future, despite having their share of difficult problems too. We
are competing against them for the economic leadership of the free
world, which we have too easily taken for granted, as if it were an
inevitable birthright which we would enjoy forever. If we adopt
the liberal model of state planning and dependency, then we are
abandoning what made this country great.
If we quietly accept the inevitability of liberal
programs which perpetuate dependency and the sense of various groups
being victims in an unfair society, then we shouldn't be surprised by
the conflicts in cities and the liberal insurgency which so easily
rationalizes taking whatever they can get from other people. |
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can't just mope about other countries doing things which we may regard
as unfair. They are free to choose how to compete, and so are we.
If we play by their rules as a state-directed economy, or with the
liberal spending overheads which destroy our path to prosperity and
reward political party favors as the key to success, then we are
fighting for economic leadership with both hands tied behind our backs.
All politics is local. That's where conservatives
need to win hearts and minds - not in Washington DC.
The fight won't be won through partisan rhetoric or
more "compassionate" federal spending programs. The key is to
demonstrably deliver better outcomes where we have been entrusted by the
public with a leadership role, while also engaging in work to develop
better solutions where we remain in the minority.
If we simply accept defeat in our cities as
inevitable, then it will remain inevitable no matter how bad those
cities will become, and we will all pay for this serious threat to the
prosperity of this country. |
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