Are Urban Ghettos Our Political Hostages?

"St Peter Repentant" by Francisco de Goya 1823-25, Phillips Collection, Washington

 

Some food for thought:

It was the great luck of the poor blacks of New Orleans that a great wind came along to carry them away from servitude to their political leaders. The Black Caucus of America's Congress keeps urban blacks as political hostages, much as the regimes of the Arab world have exploited Palestinian refugees, whom they refuse to take in, and expel when convenient.

In addition to citing the New York Times article "Katrina's Tide Carries Many to Hopeful Shores", Spengler supports his view by highlighting that China's economic growth arose from "the displacement of hundreds of millions to the coast from the interior over the course of a century". He called it "the greatest migration of peoples in history" and that "the US long since accomplished the great transition from farm to city, but pockets of immiserated rural culture remain in the great cities".

New Orleans notoriously enclosed the poorest black population in the United States. The city produced nothing of note, hosted no great financial institutions, attracted no entrepreneurs in the emerging technology industries, but offered an urban theme park to tourists attracted by the garish carnival, jazz funerals, decaying 19th-century architecture, Creole cooking, an officially tolerated sex industry - in short, the lurid slop of Anne Rice novels.

To the regret of tourists who no more will click their tongues over the quaintness of New Orleans culture, Katrina washed away the detritus of the US south's putrescent aristocracy. Brennan's, the city's best-known purveyor of local cuisine, will continue to cook gumbo at its Las Vegas location, joining the local reproductions of Venetian canals and the Eiffel Tower in America's commercial museum of world culture.

He further makes the point that democracy stands in the way to what he believes would be the best remedy for poor people in urban ghettos, namely to expel them.

The best thing the US could do for the poor people of its urban ghettos is to expel them. One does not do poor people a favor by concentrating them in government housing (or for that matter refugee camps) where they depend on the public dole. Given the incidental costs of major hurricanes, there probably are cheaper ways to accomplish this, eg, simply pay them to leave.

This is difficult to accomplish in a democracy, to be sure, for the elected representatives of immiserated black Americans form a bloc large enough to thwart legislative attempts to better their conditions. Were the urban poor dispersed into the rich regions of the country, they no longer would vote as a bloc for the sort of congress members who now conspire to keep them poor. [...]

China's advantage is that it is not a democracy and can manage the great transfer of population by fiat (see China must wait for democracy).

It is hard for me to accept, that democracy might stand in the way of improving the living conditions of fellow citizens.

If there is some truth to the assertion, that urban ghettos are being deliberately kept poor and isolated, as Spengler suggests, and if this was motivated by the base desire to ensure re-election for the representatives in question, my question is, are there solutions to achieve the break up of urban ghettos, or do we have to accept, that unless a natural disaster brings about drastic change, our democratic system is in essence to blame for perpetual procrastination and stagnation, thus preventing any change for the better.

Comments

[Assistant Village Idiot]

The government gives cruel gifts to those in cities. The Section 8 housing subsidy, in which you pay 30% of your income for rent, the government making up the rest, virtually binds you to staying in the same place indefinitely once you start receiving it. If the local unemployment rises to 28% (your children may wish to work even if you are unable), crime makes the city increasingly dangerous, and the schools are terrible, you are still being paid to stay there. It would be a great kindness to pay people to leave, and cheap in the long run even if the amount were large.

Milton Friedman's negative income tax may still be the best way home.

[gringoman]

Alexandra: "it is hard for me to accept, that democracy might stand in the way of improving the living conditions of fellow citizens."

Alexandra, au contraire, it's the easiest concept in the world to accept---if you've spent too many years observing how white pols and their black lieutenants depend on their (faithful gimme) dependents in the plantations of the urban U.S.--- phenomena which are vaster, even if more dismal, than the ante-bellum plantations of the Old South.And unlike the original plantations, the neo-type has allowed generations of white liberals or "progressives" to see themselves as caring and compassionate, so unlike bigots and fascists and racists.....

Jeremayakova: Poverty is not a crime"
-Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)

"Poverty sucks"
-caption to tacky 1980s poster of a man in slacks, blazer, ascot, and yachtman's cap leaning against a Rolls and hoisting a champagne glass

Jeremayakova,

"Poverty may not be a crime, but it certainly is a sin," Loose paraphrase by gringoman of G.B. Shaw.

Too cruel? Too unfeeling? Too dreadful? But you know what a socialist Mr. Shaw was!

[Stefan]

Kenny is making a very important point here. Those who make their living off selling people victimhood do a great disservice to the country. There is a certain pleasure in the great self-righteousness that comes from being a popular media victim group. Those that stand up and give lofty speeches through the media mega-phone about injustice and poverty have a very potent message and a lot of power. It sounds great!! Of course we hate poverty, of course we hate injustice, and of course we hate racism, crime, and urban decay!! It all sounds like something we can and should all get behind. Those leaders who are ready to lead us to the new American utopia are ready to ride and the only ones who refuse to fight are those who are uncaring, cruel, and racist. Problem is that there never is any great war on poverty.

There was a time when liberals (meant more in the sense that you would understand it Michael) thought that humanity was on the verge of disproving the Bible which said ‘the poor will always be with us’. It was to be done by the great human tool of Government. It was going to employ the unemployed, house the homeless, cure the sick, solve crime, etc. It was in essence going to create heaven on earth. It was all within our grasp. Those dreamy days are mostly past. It didn’t fly. A great example is that of the inner-city housing projects. Well-meaning (no doubt) liberal folk decided that it was a good idea to level entire neighborhoods, cover everything in concrete, and erect cold bland mass housing units to solve housing in the inner cities. Where did this idea come from? Why, it was inspired directly from the Soviet Union, the great master of social engineering!! Needless to say it was and still is a total, bleeping disaster.

If you are selling a product then it is important that you continue to convince your market that they need your product. If you are selling “victim hood” then you better damn well make sure that your constituents keep being, or at least keep feeling like, victims. Have you ever heard of an environmentalist that ever says anything is getting better? Those that make a fat living off (insert victim group) activism are always telling you things are getting worse. I heard this past year that racism in the US was “as bad as it had been since slavery and Jim Crow” all while the most powerful woman in the world is an African American who came up in the Deep South. There is no attempt at really solving anything. There is only demagoguery and power grabbing.

The only antidote to poverty comes from the culture. If the culture encourages strong families, education, work (no matter how hard or trivial it may seem), self-reliance, and responsibility for yourself, your family, and your community then people will thrive. If the culture encourages decadence, dependency, perpetual victimhood, and sloth then it will end up looking like New Orleans regardless of what the color of the citizens’ skin may be. If you have people who are dependent on the government for everything then they don’t end up being grateful and humble but rather (because not working is a crushing blow to human dignity) end up bitter, angry, and feeling entitled to everything they desire.

In the Encyclical “Laborem Exercens”, John Paul II writes:

“(Work) is not only good in the sense that it is useful or something to enjoy; it is also good as being something worthy, that is to say, something that corresponds to man's dignity, that expresses this dignity and increases it. If one wishes to define more clearly the ethical meaning of work, it is this truth that one must particularly keep in mind. Work is a good thing for man-a good thing for his humanity-because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes "more a human being".

[Darrell]

New Orleans has been the petri dish for the wacky experiments of the Left(that's Democrats, for any of you who don't know)and we are just seeing the progeny of that experiment. The lesson? Don't vote for Democrats and the Left. The Left promotes dependence and keep everyone perpetually needy--and disgruntled and envious. Envious of what others have--class warfare, class envy--offering no way out. The goal, of course, to achieve universal misery. And universal dependence. That's their concept of fairness. Except for party higher-ups, of course. They know better than you--the smartest people in the room, "truth" be told. But their "truth" has nothing to do with facts. If Clinton was the sitting President, would we even be discussing Katrina? Wouldn't they just point out that he was the first one, the only one, to order the complete evacuation of the city, days before the storm hit? Wouldn't they be pointing out that the rescue effort was one of the largest in history(the fastest and largest for FEMA) and point out the reasons and obstacles for the delays? Missing roads and the fact that one deploys their resources outside the expected path of destruction from the storm. If they have a functioning brain cell, that is. And the fact that FEMA is NOT the first reponder of record--never was, never intended to be. But forget facts. Just like we must forget the results of the Left's programs. Results aren't important--good intentions are!

[Kenny Pierce]

Laocoon is exactly right. Elizabeth Anscombe wrote a classic paper back in -- when, maybe the late '40's? -- about frustration of the will of the majority through majority vote. It's one of those counterintuitive ideas that, once you think through it, you realize it genuinely does work that way.

Michael, if we try to step back from the specific case of New Orleans, there's a general principle that in a democracy people do not act in their own best interests, but rather in what they perceive to be their own best interests -- and people are rather famously easy to deceive about what's in their own best interests, which is why Madison Avenue exists. Demagogues wish the people to act in the best interests of the demagogues rather than in the best interests of the people; and therefore (a) in the short term, demagogues frequently try to deceive the people, and (b) in the long term, the self-interest of the demagogues influences them toward a preference for a voting public that is not sufficiently well-educated to be able to see through demagogic lies. The second is one of the many reasons a free people should prefer that the government (at the top of which one may expect to find demagogues) not be allowed to play any significant role in the education of children.

In the more specific dynamic of the politics of victimhood, the demagogues of victimhood make a living by telling the voters, "You cannot solve your problems without my help, and therefore you should give me money and power so that I can help you." There is no particular reason that this should be true in most cases (other than when the problems are problems that have been created by bad government, such as legally enforced Jim Crow laws or imprisonment of poor families in terrible school districts because the education lobby consistently defeats educational freedom of choice). But even where initially there really is a problem and the voting public really does need help, the most obvious result of a solution to the problem is that the demagogue will cease to be necessary and therefore will cease to be able to convince the masses to keep giving him money and power. Therefore the self-interest of demagogues who "are here to help you," is perpetually to convince the public that (a) the public has problems, (b) nobody can solve the problem but the demagogue, and (c) the demagogue can solve the problem even though he's been "solving" it for forty years and is still claiming that the problem exists.

Now obviously if you have one political party whose general philosophy is that most good solutions aren't government solutions, their ability to retain perpetual power and wealth by telling voters, "You need our government programs to help you," is severely constrained by the speed with which the hypocricy of their self-contradictory rhetoric becomes apparent. Therefore perpetual-victimhood demagogues will naturally migrate to parties that claim that the solution to any problem is probably a government solution; and in the United States this means that such demagogues are found disproportionately in the Democratic Party. This does not, however, mean that the problem is confined only to Democrats -- a Republican demagogue simply moves to Madison Avenue where he tries to convince you that you'll never get laid if you have dandruff and the only product that can really fix your problem of celibacy-by-dandruff, is his client's new wonder shampoo.

In the specific case of inner-city black poverty, all the classic marks of victimhood demagoguery are there: a constant drumbeat of rhetoric trying to convince poor inner-city blacks that they are the victims of a grand conspiracy they cannot hope to overcome save through "black leaders;" constant claims that the solutions that have been proposed and indeed largely implemented by the Democratic Party over the past thirty or forty years are still the only solutions that offer hope to inner-city blacks; simultaneous claims that despite decades of problem-"solving," the problems of racism are worse than ever, but that anybody who suggests that perhaps it might be time to consider trying a different set of solutions is an "Uncle Tom" and a pariah...

So if you want to see it as a partisan issue, you can. But there's no obligation to do so; it's clearly an instructive case study in a particular kind of political dynamic that takes place wherever democracy is practiced by the relatively uneducated and gullible, and its connection in this particular instance with the American Democratic Party is accidental rather than essential.

[Jeremayakovka]

"Poverty is not a crime"
-Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)

"Poverty sucks"
-caption to tacky 1980s poster of a man in slacks, blazer, ascot, and yachtman's cap leaning against a Rolls and hoisting a champagne glass

I always run the first phrase through my head, musak-like, upon entering the "poverty aisle" of our republic's free-supermarket-place of ideas. I let it be my first, stern, compassionately conservative thought when weighing punditry about: what poverty "causes" or "gives rise to"; about the flabby grandiloquence ("blight") of socio-econo-ideologues lecturing that it can -- or should -- be eradicated (nice try, MLK) or that war can be waged upon it (nice try, LBJ). In my no longer humble opinion and lived experience (rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-one rack of clean dress shirts), poverty can't and shouldn't be eradicated. Repeat: Poverty can't and shouldn't be eradicated. ("Shouldn't" of course isn't necessary after declaring "can't": better said, since poverty objectively can't be eradicated, we therefore should waste no one's time, energy or attention in promoting the pipe dream that it can.)

Now that statement won't get you many votes in an election in a major American city. But it should get you attention, and more important, get some attention on the issue of poverty and what to do about it. In a word: Opportunity. In two words: economic opportunity. *Not* "economic democracy", which is just a buzzword for socialist (a la francaise) and social-democratic (American-style) statist "benefit" programs (a bureucratic fulfillment of the gangsta prophecy that "Whitey Will Pay").

I'll spare ATB's readers specific personal anecdotes, but suffice it say, like some of us, I've known considerable extremes of want and plenty, from Harlem to Martha's Vineyard, literally, and beyond. The first form of wealth to generate is opportunity: give me frontiers of opportunity and I won't worry about getting trapped in a Chinese box.

[North by Northwest]

Actually, Michael, I don't think this is a partisan question; lest of course you suggest that Bush is responsible for Katrina ;-) After all, it isn't about who or what caused poverty but how to overcome it in a democratic society.

Spengler's claim in relation to expelling poor people in urban Ghettos as a means of breaking the vicious cycle of poverty is bold and controversial. The NYT article paved the way for forming this opinion. Does it have merit? Early data seems to support it.

Is it politically feasible to 'expel' people living in urban ghettos? IMO absolutely not, no matter who the representatives are or what party they belong to. In short, I do believe only natural disasters can do that.

Are there any alternative measures to transform existing ghettos into prospering communities. If there are, and if they have been tried, one would have to conclude, that they have miserably failed.

Also, whenever ghettos were in fact transformed, then that was usually achieved through rising property prices, which had the effect of gradually crowing-out the poorer residents. This kind of transformation is of course merely a re-location of the problem not a solution as such.

Frankly, I can't think of a remedy which will achieve necessary change to the collective psyche prevalent in most ghettos, save for the power of faith (this quote stood out in the NYT article):

When he [Mr. Marcel] talks of the grandmother who raised him there, Mercedes Jackson, he dwells on two points: she worked a lot — as a hospital aide — and prayed even more. "I cannot say I ever saw a day when she did not get on her knees," [...]

Ms. Marcell grew up in like fashion — in a working poor family stuck in the projects but steadied by faith.

Hardly a satisfactory suggestion....

[Michael Galien]

So.

Wait.

It's to blaim on democracy that people are poor. Better yet; it is to blaim on the democrats (quite friendly of everyone not to 'name' them litteraly, but come on; we all know for who the poor African-Americans vote for).

How convenient.

[Laocoon]

It is EASY to imagine that "democracy might stand in the way of improving the living conditions of fellow citizens"

Collective choice often produces results that no individual in the group would want. The prisoner's dilemma (particularly when generalized to large numbers), the tragedy of the commons, and so on show ways in which the free choice of individuals in groups give results which all of them would like to prevent. That's why people who face a "tragedy of the commons" situation often evolve social rules (e.g. seniority, handing fishing areas down the generations, etc.) to prevent free choice.

Of course, non-democratic systems have problems all their own, but there's no reason to be surprised when democracy turns out to be imperfect.