Imagine a city where all the major economic planks of the statist or "progressive" platform have been enacted:
- A "living wage" ordinance, far above the federal minimum wage, for all public employees and private contractors.
- A school system that spends significantly more per pupil than the national average.
- A powerful school employee union that militantly defends the exceptional pay, benefits and job security it has won for its members.
- Other government employee unions that do the same for their members.
- A tax system that aggressively redistributes income from businesses and the wealthy to the poor and to government bureaucracies.
Would this be a shining city on a hill, exciting the admiration of all? We don't have to guess, because there is such a city right here in our state: Detroit.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Why I'm Not A "Progressive" or a "Liberal"
I believe in evidence:
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6 comments:
The article completely ignores Mayor Coleman Young's contribution to the decline of Detroit.
Not that Detroit wouldn't have taken a beating with the entrance of foreign competitors to car market but problems could have been headed off decades ago if they hadn't been made worse by Young's aggressive race-baiting and hard-line leftist ideology. When other cities were dealing with the changing face of society, the rise of the suburbs and the subsequent abandonment of the central city Young continued to act like a regional potentate he'd entered the mayoral mansion as.
Progressive or statist? Come on.
Progressive politics is a populist movement that came out of the corruption and anti-democratic society of the Gilded Age. Having never lived under anything but progressive government, I can see how you are naive to the blanket of safety and prosperity it provides for you. It's been so effective, you don't actually see it as government. It seems like a natural state to you. But that's not the reality. And this description is not a viable reason to dismiss 'progressives.'
I resent being called naive just because it satisfies your ego. The people of today who call themselves "progressives" are who/what I worry about, not the "progressives" of a hundred years ago. If we were concerned about what happened a hundred years ago we'd be thrashing the Democrats for calling themselves the "White Man's Party".
Oh come on Darren, condescension's a standard response by lefties. It obviates the need for a substantive defense while implying the superiority that all lefties assume.
So Mike can assert that prosperity is a result of lefty politics, rather then occurring in spite of lefty politics, without having to explain how seizing unearned wealth and squandering it on uneconomic purposes. As a conservative you, and I, would just be too stupid to understand the subtle truth of the proposition so why bother trying to explain?
Oh, and Mike? "Progressive", i.e. lefty, politics has always been with us. Taking what isn't yours to take is simply a feature, if not a particularly admirable feature, of humanity. Lefties have simply found a way to spin the notion so its practitioners can cling to the notion that they're actually doing something noble and not just something to satisfy their own conceits of fill their own pockets.
You'll notice that "progressive" politics reaches its natural end point in authoritarian regimes and struggles against constant disappointment at the results lefty politics produces in democratic states.
About 5 years ago, there was an article in the major Detroit paper, entitled "Will the Last Person out of Detroit Please Turn out the Lights" (approx).
Mazenko has made me see the light!
The chains aren't there to bind us... The shackles aren't there to hold us in place... They are all there to protect us!
Oh, what a fool I have been!
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