{"id":37701,"date":"2013-08-05T12:14:30","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T17:14:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=37701"},"modified":"2014-04-28T11:55:32","modified_gmt":"2014-04-28T16:55:32","slug":"slouching-toward-dystopia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=37701","title":{"rendered":"Slouching Toward Dystopia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the left’s current ascendancy, across the US but especially in currently-single-party Minnesota, is the complete control they have of the long-range planning bodies that control the spending of so very, very much money in our society.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And Katherine Kersten is onto the biggest and baddest such body in Minnesota, and their real aim – to take control of life as we know it in Minnesota<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The goal – from the Obama administration all the way down to the State of Minnesota – is to view metropolitan areas as “Regions”, and plan those regions so as to start funnelling people, by means subtle and brash, from the outskirts back into the cities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It’s called Regionalism, and it’s not merely for your and society’s own good; it intends to set things straight:<\/p>\n

Regionalism is driven by a core ideological conviction: The cause of the poverty and social dysfunction that bedevil America\u2019s cities is the greed and racial bigotry of suburbanites \u2014 especially those in prosperous, outer-ring suburbs, which are viewed as unjustly excluding the poor. Regionalists believe that financial aid for the inner ring won\u2019t remedy this injustice. A profound change in governance is required.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s an authoritarian approach to building Utopia.\u00a0 And like all such attempts throughout history, it requires a villain.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What sort of change? The title of a book by regionalist guru David Rusk puts it bluntly: \u201cCities without Suburbs.\u201d In regionalists\u2019 view, suburbs with their own tax bases are, by definition, a menace to cities, and the distinctions between the two must be wiped out as completely as possible.<\/p>\n

Regionalists\u2019 strategy to effectively merge cities and suburbs turns on two ideologically freighted buzzwords: \u201cequity\u201d and \u201csustainability.\u201d \u201cEquity\u201d is code for using public policy to redistribute wealth and to engineer economic equality among demographic groups.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Regionalists view metrowide \u201ceconomic integration\u201d as one of government\u2019s primary responsibilities. Their plan to accomplish it is twofold: Disperse urban poverty throughout a metro area via low-income housing and make suburban life so inconvenient and expensive that suburbanites are pushed back into the city.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So the suburbs – and suburbanites – are the enemy, the Emanuel Goldsteins against whom the Regionalists will muster their side’s ignorant rage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSustainability\u201d means policies that would override market forces to ensure that in the future, the great majority of new jobs, economic development and public works projects are funneled into the metro area\u2019s urban core and inner ring \u2014 where, not coincidentally, regionalists\u2019 own political base is concentrated. \u201cSustainable\u201d policies promote high-density, Manhattan-style living, and attempt to wean us away from our cars and push us to walk, bike or use public transit to get to work.<\/p>\n

As one critic \u2014 speculating on MSP 2040\u2019s likely outcome \u2014 lamented: \u201cDo we all have to live in a 1,500-square-foot condo above a coffee shop on a transit line?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’d be the goal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, if you’re a conservative – at least, a libertarian-conservative – you know that allocating society’s resources via political means, especially to promote political ends, is the least-efficient way to do it.\u00a0 And it’s Economics 101 to observe that “making people pay more, or less, than they naturally would for a good, or service (or, by extension, government) is the road to wrenching unintended consequences”.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But that’s the point – making society, or at least the less-favored part of it, pay the bill for utopia:<\/p>\n

Suburbanites will disproportionately shoulder the costs of this socially engineered transformation, paying more in taxes and getting less back in infrastructure and public services…Regionalists\u2019 strategy for imposing their agenda hinges on giving regional bodies like the Met Council the ultimate trump: the power of the checkbook. The Obama administration\u2019s \u201cSustainable Communities Initiative\u201d (SCI) provides a model. SCI channels federal funds for land use, transportation and housing projects through regional bodies. The catch is that, to participate, municipalities must embrace redistributive \u201cequity\u201d goals.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kersten doesn’t mention – because it’s outside the scope of the piece – that the “unintended consequences” of this sort of gigantistic destruction of the free market toward political goals are always, always vastly worse than planned.\u00a0 Trying to force people and jobs back into cities at a time when the market is obsoleting the central core city <\/a>– a concept that never actually occurred in human history outside of the 200-year window of the Industrial Revolution, a period that is drawing to a close even as we speak – is going to cause huge <\/em>problems.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kevin Williamson may have been dead right; it may well be that the faster the Federal government goes broke, the better.\u00a0 At least it’ll stymie this sort of authoritarian meddling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the left’s current ascendancy, across the US but especially in currently-single-party Minnesota, is the complete control they have of the long-range planning bodies that control the spending of so very, very much money in our society.\u00a0 And Katherine Kersten is onto the biggest and baddest such body in Minnesota, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[289,259],"class_list":["post-37701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-socialism","tag-kevin-williamson","tag-utopia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37701"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37710,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37701\/revisions\/37710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}