Which came first, the dead chicken or the rotten egg?
A bit gruesome. Sure. But it’s Halloween, no? Trick or Treat time.
Anyway, the subject for today’s exploration into contemporary horror is the modern city, so expensive it frightens middle-income earners away.
But wait. It’s not all cities. Only some are horror shows.
Particularly, I’m referring to those in “blue” states, the ones run by “liberal” Democrats.
It’s been pretty obvious for some time — especially as we witness hordes of everyday folks moving to parts South, particularly to Texas’s sprawling cities. But if you needed some statistics and graphs and the like, Derek Thompson provides them over at The Atlantic. His title addresses his basic question: “Why Middle-Class Americans Can’t Afford to Live in Liberal Cities.” Citing economist Jed Kolko, he notes the most astounding thing about housing in modern cities: “Liberal cities seem to have the worst affordability crises.”
Or, as Kolko puts it, “[e]ven after adjusting for differences of income, liberal markets tend to have higher income inequality and worse affordability.”
Why? Thompson contemplates the chicken-and-eggness of it all. Do liberal progressives congregate in coastal cities with limited land availability, and just happen to find themselves crunching out home growth, thus raising prices and reducing affordability? Or do they cause it?
Considering the nature of their favored policies, they almost certainly (if inadvertently) cause it.
Big government inevitably yields big bad effects. Support big government? Expect more inequality, not less. Then demand more government to “solve” the problem. Which causes yet more bad effects.
This trick-and-treat trap should horrify big government advocates.
It certainly horrifies me.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
What is the use of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something?
On October 30, 1907, Sol Tax was born. Tax, an important anthropologist at the University of Chicago, organized a four-day conference on military conscription, which was the start of an intellectual movement that led to the end of the draft less than seven years later. Tax’s most famous work was probably his study of a Guatemalen Indian economy, “Penny Capitalism.”
The charge of unnecessariness is surely false when we’re talking about customers who do want the most cutting-edge technology and can put it to good use. But it’s false in a broader perspective too — unless we suppose that all advances in human civilization beyond the level of the hut and the bearskin are “largely unnecessary” to human survival and well-being.
And if you are wondering why lobbyists might not take a shine to this Republican Representative from Michigan’s Third Congressional District, consider the calumnies his detractors directed against him.
On October 28, 1886, in New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland, despite the fact that the monument was not a federally funded project.
True the Vote, which combats voter fraud, sued the Internal Revenue Service because of the tax agency’s deliberate obstruction of applications from Tea Party and conservative organizations like True the Vote. The long delay in approval was costly in part because many prospective contributors to TTV had been awaiting the granting of 501(c)(3) status before going ahead with their donations. True the Vote’s president, Catherine Engelbrecht, was also