{"id":59311,"date":"2016-06-27T06:00:29","date_gmt":"2016-06-27T11:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=59311"},"modified":"2016-06-23T17:05:23","modified_gmt":"2016-06-23T22:05:23","slug":"stacked-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=59311","title":{"rendered":"Stacked"},"content":{"rendered":"

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds wasn’t writing about the Twin Cities’ Met Council in his USA Today piece, “Why Politicians Love Cities”. \u00a0 But in another sense, he was\u00a0precisely\u00a0<\/em>writing about the Met Council.<\/p>\n

Reynolds cites urban theorist and “New Urbanism” critic Joel Kotkin’s new book (we’ve met Kotkin on this blog before) in getting to three reasons why politicians – like the Met Council – loooove big cities; \u00a0snobbery, graft and politics.<\/p>\n

I’ll commend Reynolds’ article to you for the first two<\/a>. \u00a0As to the politics?<\/p>\n

Cities tend to repel – and, ultimately, exclude – people who intend to raise children; it’s become something of a phenomenon<\/a>. \u00a0 What it’s not, it would seem, is accidental:<\/p>\n

Politicians like to pursue policies that encourage their political enemies to leave, while encouraging those who remain to vote for them.\u00a0(This is known as \u201cthe Curley effect\u201d after James Michael Curley,\u00a0a former mayor of Boston.)\u00a0 People who have children, or plan to, tend to be more conservative<\/a>, or at least more bourgeois, than those who do not. By encouraging high density and mass transit, urban politicians (who are almost always on the left) encourage people who might oppose them to \u201cvote with their feet\u201d and move to the suburbs.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t necessarily good for the cities they rule.\u00a0Curley\u2019s approach, which involved \u201cwasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston,\u201d as David Henderson wrote on theEconLog<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0shaped the electorate to his benefit.\u00a0Result: \u201cBoston as a consequence stagnated, but Curley kept winning elections.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s OK.\u00a0Politicians don\u2019t care about you.\u00a0They care about power, in urban planning\u00a0and in everything else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pushing people who tend more conservative out of the city\/ies is just plain good politics for the DFL that the Met Council exists to serve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds wasn’t writing about the Twin Cities’ Met Council in his USA Today piece, “Why Politicians Love Cities”. \u00a0 But in another sense, he was\u00a0precisely\u00a0writing about the Met Council. Reynolds cites urban theorist and “New Urbanism” critic Joel Kotkin’s new book (we’ve met Kotkin on this blog before) in getting to three reasons […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[255],"tags":[206],"class_list":["post-59311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-racket","tag-met-council"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59311","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=59311"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59312,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59311\/revisions\/59312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}