“…so that it can fruit again.”
A story in the UK about shrinking my home town, Flint, Michigan. They might as well, if Lansing isn’t going to do anything to improve the business environment there. I suspect a lot of Wolverines were hoping that Obama would nominate the governor, to get her out of there. Not that her replacement would be much of an improvement. But they keep voting for them.
No offense intended, Rand, but I liken Detroit (and its comparable automobile towns) to the mining and timber camps of the American West. Some of them are still inhabited, but most became ghost towns.
Detroit is just the first of the big boom towns of the industrial era, and is on its way to becoming the first ghost town of the industrial era.
Not really a good analogy. Mining towns and timber camps were located where they were because of where the minerals had been deposited and trees grew. There was never any huge advantage to Flint and Detroit’s location when it came to growing the car industry — it was a historical contingency of the fact that the carriage industry had been there, and it was a natural transition, and the business environment and trade environment was good for it at the time. Toyota or Honda could move in to Flint and be just as successful as they are in Tennessee and Ohio except for one thing. The Michigan business environment, as a result of forced unionization and high taxes. That could be fixed, and may be, but it might require a change either in the Michigan electorate, or its attitude.
The power of unions (and any special interest, really) to capture the political establishment is why I favor several reforms that many would consider radical. I consider them the bare minimum necessary to actually make the government responsive to the electorate:
1. Strict bar on politicians accepting campaign funds from any source other than directly from a natural person constituent.
2. Some sort of public funding match once a threshold of contributions is reached.
3. Switch from plurality-wins elections to ranged voting elections.
4. Revocation of all the laws the Republicans and Democrats have conspired to pass that protects them from political competition.
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But in the end, Rand is right – you can’t protect an electorate from its own stupidity. If I could we wouldn’t have the One.
MG-
A couple points.
1. We are not in a “post industrial” era. We (planet Earth) manufacture more goods today than at any point in history. Michigan has simply made itself uncompetitive relative to Alabama or Hong Kong.
2. Mining camps die when the vein of ore runs dry. Logging camps follow the timber. There is no similar event for manufacturing towns that import material and export products. There is no “natural life cycle” to a manufacturing town. They can continue indefinitely as long as there are materials to be imported and a demand for the product they make. We know steel still exists and cars are still purchased, so there’s no “natural” reasons Flint, MI should die. They’ve brought this on themselves.
Not only that, but they’ve got examples of places like South Bend, Ind., which managed to survive despite the closure of Studebaker to show them what to do and what didn’t work. (It took decades… I remember driving past blocks of still standing empty factory buildings when I worked there downtown in the early 1980s.)
To make another comment about Flint, which is only some 60 miles from Detroit, the Great Lakes were a natural carriage site for transport of ore from the north. I worked at Great Lakes Steel, just a few miles South of Detroit in the early 70’s. We made automotive steel, some of which went to Flint.
Detroit made wagons and stoves before the auto’s got started. It had a natural advantage of location. Not so much today but that fact is not as important as it once was. The tech base that built up made Detroit the industrial capital of the world, especially due to what the nation required in WW II.
The UAW and their political support team guessed wrong about 15 years ago when much of the present problem became evident. But what would you have done in their place? It was far from obvious.
In the long run, or in retrospect, mistakes were made. I just don’t see those involved making much other choices at the time and when the disaster became apparent the political class in Michigan did nothing to help.
I was an admirer of John Engler when he was Michigan’s Governor and thought he had a shot at national office. He went off to head a Manufacturing lobby. Good work if you can get it but it left a void in the Michigan Republican Party and the state has been poorer for that since.
Ok, I plead uncle on the industrial ghost town analogy. I am glad it stirred thoughtful comments.
I don’t typically post just to be provocative, though, so I hope I didn’t bend anyone’s nose too far out of joint.
If you need a semi-industrial ghost town to think about, Troy, New York should do.
It sits on the Hudson river and was a major transportation hub with the Erie Canal and the early railroads. A nearby major GE plant and an arsenal were some of the ‘anchor’ industries. (Though they’re outside the city limits.) It is home to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute – one of the first engineering colleges.
When the canal traffic died off, the -city- died. The core of downtown through the eighties and nineties was rows of ten-plus story buildings with a business in the bottom floor and all the floors above that boarded up.
It had -city- problems with gang and drugs – but no tax base at all. So no cash with which to fix much of anything. People were living in the nice dense housing, yet going elsewhere to work, shop, -and- play. (Albany, Schenectady.) The colleges tied down a hefty chunk of land with little tax revenue.
The state capitol Albany recognized the issue and moved (read: forced) a couple of their bureaucratic offices into some of the buildings. This plan failed miserably IIRC due to the bureaucrat’s complaints over harassment and threats just getting into the buildings.
Another solution was to block off a couple pastures far from the main downtown area as a ‘tech park’ and try to hop on the whole tech bubble. It looked like -that- was working somewhat, even though it was essentially building a new city from scratch.
I have no idea what’s happened recently, but losing the ‘major hub’ status hurt Troy pretty fiercely.
The UAW and their political support team guessed wrong about 15 years ago when much of the present problem became evident. But what would you have done in their place? It was far from obvious.
How old are you Ralphe? The rot in Michigan goes back a lot further than 15 years. I could see the handwriting on that particular wall 35 years ago in the middle of the then-worst recession since 1929. What to do was obvious to me. I got the hell out. I’ve been a Californian since 1974. With things in California now looking a lot like they did 35 years ago in Michigan, I may have to up stakes and light out again.
The problems are twofold:
(1) Liberalism is not a rational basis upon which to run any significant political or economic entity. When it is tried, the entity sickens and dies. The nations of Western Europe, the States of Michigan and California, the Cities of Detroit and Los Angeles, the L.A. Unified School District, General Motors Corp., Pacifica Broadcasting – anything run on liberal precepts becomes a basket case in short order and then lingers on as a subsidy sink, sucking up resources and pumping out social toxins. This progression seems as inevitable and immutable to me as gravity.
(2) Liberals simply refuse to accept that (1) is true. Instead of ceasing and desisting their destructive nonsense, their solution to current liberal-caused difficulties is always to double down.
Unlike the rest of you, I think MG’s analogy has legs. There are plenty of cities throughout history that disappeared. Some died as the ghost mining towns did, due to exhaustion of resources. Some died because someone with a big army burned them to the ground and killed or drove off the inhabitants. And some died merely because the advantages that led to the existence and growth of the city no longer existed. I think Detroit is in that last category of city. My view is that whatever led to Detroit becoming the car capital of the world at one point, no longer exists. The city is slowly dying.
My view is that it really doesn’t matter if the cause is exhaustion of the local silver vein or a mix of corruption, out of control labor unions, and overbearing government regulation. Once the negatives are large enough, the town or city can die just the same.
The difference, Karl, is that you can’t easily restore a vein of ore, or immediately regrow near-by trees, but you can restore the political socio-economic conditions that made a city great. But so far, this isn’t happening in Michigan.