Amazon Retreats from Anarchy

It turns out that hating on big business while shedding crocodile tears for street criminals and the homeless can have negative consequences.

Seattle, Washington, which in recent years has become increasingly “progressive” with job-​killing minimum wage rate hikes, openly socialist city council members, and a whole mess of bizarre pro-​crime policies, is of course driving businesses (along with decent citizens) out of the city limits.

Amazon, the giant, uber-​successful Internet business announced, last week, that it will “relocate office staff in downtown Seattle due to a sustained uptick in violent crime,” wrote Thomas Kika for Newsweek. And “other businesses in the area” are continuing coronavirus lockdown policies by sticking “with remote work for the same reason.”

Government’s first job is law and order. There’s a case to be made that all other state tasks are decidedly optional, and those other jobs that muck up the first job should be chopped.

Progressives don’t get that.

But speaking of “chopped” — remember CHOP and CHAZ? These were the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest and Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone insurrections of the city’s infamous 2020 “summer of love,” where for weeks on end “protesters” took over the streets and kept out the police and generally behaved like anarchist revolutionaries. It was all very disorderly, yet city officials apologized to-​and-​for the movement for the longest time — presumably because the “protesters” sounded so righteous in standard leftist manner: apparently lacking any arguments against this kind of thing. 

The occupied, autonomous, dangerous inanity was finally stopped, but the rise in vagrancy and crime continues.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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