{"id":18393,"date":"2013-07-18T17:10:27","date_gmt":"2013-07-18T21:10:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=18393"},"modified":"2013-07-18T17:10:27","modified_gmt":"2013-07-18T21:10:27","slug":"the-wages-of-liberalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/18393\/the-wages-of-liberalism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wages of Liberalism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/business\/detroit-emergency-manager-files-largest-municipal-bankruptcy-in-us-history\/2013\/07\/18\/fa98c9c4-efe6-11e2-8c36-0e868255a989_story.html\" target=\"_blank\">This story<\/a> would be slightly less depressing even if we hadn&#8217;t all seen it coming for years:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Detroit on Thursday became the largest city in U.S. history to file for bankruptcy, as the state-appointed emergency manager filed for Chapter 9 protection.<\/p>\n<p>Kevyn Orr, a bankruptcy expert, was hired by the state in March to lead Detroit out of a fiscal free-fall and made the filing Thursday in federal bankruptcy court.<\/p>\n<p>A number of factors \u2014 most notably steep population and tax base falls \u2014 have been blamed on Detroit&#8217;s tumble toward insolvency. Detroit lost a quarter-million residents between 2000 and 2010. A population that in the 1950s reached 1.8 million is struggling to stay above 700,000. Much of the middle-class and scores of businesses also have fled Detroit, taking their tax dollars with them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This, of course, doesn&#8217;t take the analysis back quite far enough. The population and tax base are symptoms, not causes. Why did people actually leave? Well, there were local officials <a href=\"http:\/\/news.investors.com\/ibd-editorials-perspective\/121812-637538-detroit-collapse-was-due-to-race-based-politics.htm?p=full\" target=\"_blank\">intent on driving out part of the population on racial grounds<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freedomworks.org\/blog\/rousseau\/motor-city-blues-part-i-the-myth-of-union-detroit\" target=\"_blank\">the dominance of unions<\/a> that ended up choking the auto industry, <a href=\"http:\/\/townhall.com\/columnists\/calthomas\/2013\/03\/14\/detroits-decline-n1532915\/page\/full\" target=\"_blank\">overwhelming crime rates, and a spate of corrupt politicians<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>For decades now, Detroit has been a laboratory of liberalism. Today&#8217;s news only makes explicit what many of us concluded long ago: the experiment has failed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This story would be slightly less depressing even if we hadn&#8217;t all seen it coming for years: Detroit on Thursday became the largest city in U.S. history to file for bankruptcy, as the state-appointed emergency manager filed for Chapter 9 protection. Kevyn Orr, a bankruptcy expert, was hired by the state in March to lead [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[932,351,1657,2475,2762,2448,419],"class_list":["post-18393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-bankruptcy","tag-corruption","tag-crime","tag-detroit","tag-local-government","tag-race","tag-unions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18393"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18395,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18393\/revisions\/18395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}