Originally Posted by spence
Doesn't really matter, cities had these properties long before American cities were founded.
It matters a great deal. American cities were not founded with the massive population density that some have now. How they got that way and what has changed is the crux of this discussion. American cities have many similarities in their founding to earlier cities--commerce being a major point. But their are also differences. Post colonial American cities were founded bottom-up and required greater exercise of freedom and personal responsibility than cities forged under kingly/imperial regimes. What has happened to them as they have become more governed, assuming a top-down nature with more responsibility rising to the "governers" rather than the "people" is a sapping of vitality. The population density remains but the jobs and money are not as great. Your "obvious" reason that everybody was missing ("the city is where a lot of the money is, the jobs are") does not explain why the urban poor, especially those who do not avail themselves of the jobs, vote Democrat. The top-down nature has created a dependency class who do not value freedom with responsibility, but require the handouts that give them the indentured "freedom" to do very little and get the more than deserved little in return. And those remaining who are still responsible and desire more freedom to pursue their happiness in their INDIVIDUAL way, are coerced into paying for the underclass who are there for the redistribution.
The needs of the transformed post-welfare city certainly, as you say, align better with "some" pure liberal values--BECAUSE THEY WERE TRANSFORMED SO BY THOSE LIBERAL VALUES!--which is again, like your first paragraph, circular.
So by your logic we shouldn't have a Federal government to provide interstate highways and a common defense.
In order to have a common defense (which IS an original duty of the Federal Gov., not the host of "duties" it has absconded from the states) we must BE in common. The liberal tactic of dividing us to conquer votes defeats the commonality required for a common defense. We must have internal wars between our opposing sexual, racial, financial, city/country, pro or anti Americans, marxist/capitalists, labor/management, and on and on groups who must not agree on anything that might defeat their party's chance to win the next election, before we can conduct a war against those who would destroy us, and even do that poorly because anti-war chatter subverts the mission.
Funny how some can only interpret ideas in their most extreme form.
Funny how you can complain about extreme interpretation when you can say that biasing towards the rights of the individual could easily prove DISASTROUS in the city. And bring up the federal gov. building interstate highways as if my logic precluded that.
Yet, I've heard it time and time again...
If you have heard time and time again that if everybody had a gun there would be NO crime, perhaps you have been listening to the same person or persons time and time again. I have heard some say, with good reason, that there would be LESS crime. The NO crime thing I have not yet heard. Of course there are, as you say, extremists.
It's difficult to understand statistics in that narrow context. It's like saying Hawaii's health care works so it should work in any state-spence
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