A Great Weekend Read

Recommended read for this weekend is Joel Kotkin's think piece, Ideological Hurricane, in The American Enterprise.

Kotkin, who is America's foremost writer on urban issues, has a clear and compelling thesis: Liberalism has ruled America's decaying inner cities for years, and Katrina showed just how completely the liberal pro-regulation, pro-tax, pro-welfare, anti-business, anti-entrepreneurial city governments have failed.

New Orleans was particularly burden, given the corruption and inefficiencies that overwhelm Louisiana, but our other major cities suffer the same symptoms: empty downtowns, lousy schools, crummy jobs.

Here's a good summary paragraph:

This collapse of responsibility and discipline goes against the entire grain of urban history. From republican Rome to the golden ages of Venice, Amsterdam, London and New York, cities have flourished most when they have served as places of aspiration and upward mobility, of hard work and individual accountability. By becoming mass dispensers of welfare for the unskilled, playpens for the well-heeled and fashionable, easy marks for special interests, and bunglers at maintaining public safety and dispensing efficient services to residents and businesses, many cities have become useless to the middle class, and toxic for the disorganized poor. Today's liberal urban leadership across Ameria needs to see the New Orleans storm not as a tragedy, but as a dispeller of illusions, a revealer of awful truths, and a potential harbinger of things to come in their own backyards.

The article also includes some worth-reading background into the differences between our entrenched urban black poor, our upwardly mobile suburban blacks, and our new immigrant populations, and compares our open opportunities to the oppressiveness immigrant communities face in Europe.