EditoriallUnheavenly Cities
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL Unheavenly Cities by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. T he indignation of our friends the liberal Democrats at White House charges that their policies were responsible for the Los Angeles rampage...
...Not surprisingly he is governor of one of the Republic's poorest states...
...Most of their research was unassailable and so liberals bereft of the boldness to rethink urban policies or the courage to cut off all the interest groups feasting off these policies stopped reading it...
...For years he has suggested urban reforms based on the scholarship of the aforementioned scholars...
...I doubt he has ever heard of Edward Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by King Features...
...In fact, Los Angeles's tragedy is a liberals' fiasco...
...T he indignation of our friends the liberal Democrats at White House charges that their policies were responsible for the Los Angeles rampage was, I believe, sincere...
...and he probably has not even leafed through Charles Murray's more recent and equally trenchant analysis of liberal urban policy, aptly titled Losing Ground: American Social Policy 19501980...
...Most Americans perceived the injustice of the acquittal even as they perceived the crime of Rodney King's drunken, high-speed resistance to arrest...
...No one in government has been particularly interested...
...And it is in precisely those areas where the "re-formers" promised the most—race relations, education, crime, poverty—that the decline has been greatest...
...Banfield's pioneering study of the modern urban condition, The Unheavenly City...
...They have every reason to be angry with Marlin Fitzwater's assertion that "many of the root problems that have resulted in inner-city difficulties were started in the 1960s and 1970s, and they have failed...
...The liberal Democrats are for the most part unaware of twenty years of economic and social analysis that demonstrates with the utmost cogency that the vast majority of Great Society programs begun in the 1960s and slavishly funded ever since have relegated many of the urban poor to hopeless, disorganized lives of extraordinary squalor and violence...
...Nonetheless, our cities have steadily declined since liberal Democratic "reformers" heaved out machine politicians so many years ago...
...Then the federal government began its ministrations, costing $2.6 trillion since 1965...
...While denouncing the White House, Clinton, that tribune of change and new ideas, called for vast new public works projects for the inner city and for annually raising the minimum wage to keep up with inflation...
...Since then, economists such as Milton Friedman and Finis Welch have made the case against the minimum wage law irrefutable...
...Yet they are the only plausible ideas left...
...He published his research forty years ago...
...Eliminating capital gains for inner-city investment, encouraging the poor to work with tax reductions and other rewards, implementing educational choice, privatizing government housing, encouraging private industry into troubled areas—all these enlightened policies coming from Kemp are about as popular with liberal Democrats as closing military bases in their districts...
...But it is the liberal "reformers" who have made it so difficult to convict brutes in a court of law...
...10 The American Spectator July 1992...
...If Bill Clinton is really for change he ought to read up on Kemp's policies and take a look at Yale Brozen...
...Urban policy is one of the many areas of public discourse where liberals stopped talking to conservatives years ago...
...Now along comes Secretary of Housing Jack Kemp...
...It is the liberal "reformers" who have allowed lawlessness to steadily increase on inner-city streets...
...Their consciences are clean when they brand those who would approach urban problems differently as "neglectful" (Clinton's term) or racists (Senator Jim Sasser's recent charge), because their minds are blank...
...The Democrats' most likely presidential nominee, Governor Bill Clinton, characterized Fitzwater's assertion as "scapegoating" and "unbelievable...
...I think Clinton's response is heatlfelt...
...Since the late 1960s serious scholars such as Edward Banfield, James Q. Wilson, and Milton Friedman have analyzed liberal approaches to such diverse problems as poverty, crime, and dependency and come to the conclusion that with few exceptions liberal approaches only worsen these problems...
...Professor Yale Brozen of the University of Chicago was the first economist to demonstrate that each increase in the minimum wage throws young people out of work...
...It is the liberal "reformers" who have encouraged populations to adopt racial identities and unappeasable grievances, and it is the liberal "reformers" who justify violence...
...Yet Boy Clinton is oblivious...
...He would have us index the minimum wage and throw ever more young people out of work...
...Before the liberal Democrats took over the cities, life for the urban poor was hard but steadily improving...
Vol. 25 • July 1992 • No. 7
