By Matt Parrott | 14 Comments | 
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Detroit: Killed by Socialism?
Libertarianism truly is applied autism. From time to time, a post shows up at LewRockwell.com that reminds me just how strange these bedfellows of ours truly are. Gary North has a doozy up today entitled “Health Care and Detroit: Killed by Government.” He truly believes, without a shred of self-awareness, that Detroit’s decline and fall is due to “socialism.” He doesn’t even mention white flight or crime, because they didn’t cross his mind.
As far as he knows, Whites who attempt to live in downtown Detroit are intimidated by intrusive bureaucrats, mugged by excessive taxation, raped by inflationary reserve policies, and murdered by disincentivized medical professionals. It’s a boggling demonstration of ideological tunnel vision and a necessary reminder that many of these people are loyal to their abstractions, not their countrymen.
He doesn’t even realize that Detroit has an entirely different population now than it did in its golden age. This is consistent with the final, terminal, stage of libertarianism, in which every last human is abstracted into an atomic unit of economic interest. Race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, culture, and character are little more than transactional inefficiencies. As with libertarianism’s evil twin, Marxism, the entire human experience is reduced to money.
I’m for limited government, sound money, humble foreign policy, and civil liberties. Most White Advocates are. But these issues are secondary to our identity — to who we actually are. The problem with Detroit is rooted in race — not economic policy. Downtown Detroit feels more like Mogadishu than Stockholm, despite the fact that Mogadishu is a libertarian paradise and Stockholm is quintessentially socialist. White Americans fled to the suburbs to escape ethnic street gangs, forced busing, and crumbling infrastructure. They also fled the spiraling taxation, but even that can be described as an interracial transfer of wealth.
Government didn’t kill Detroit. Our inability to accept and react responsibly to racial reality killed Detroit.
Occidental Dissent, March 24, 2010
“Libertarianism truly is applied autism.” Well said. The legalistic cackling, monetary obsession and incessant talk about rights… it is truly applied autism.
Furthermore, I oppose the statement “Government didn’t kill Detroit.” — in fact, to a large extend it did. E. Michael Jones wrote an excellent book on the matter called “The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing” a few reviews can be found here: http://www.culturewars.com/Reviews/SlaughterReviews.html
Mr. Parrott might want to re-read the article. Mr. North states explicitly that “flight out of the city” killed Detroit, and as a result the city is 82% black and has an 80% illegitimacy rate. The phrase “white flight” isn’t used, but obviously no other human migration could have reduced the population by more than half.
That said, Mr. North missed an even more telling example of black urban decay: Last November, the Pontiac Silverdome was sold at auction for barely 1% of its 1975 construction cost.
And in fact, government did kill Detroit — a succession of corrupt, incompetent black mayors and bureaucrats, plus their equally corrupt and incompetent white liberal enablers in Washington and Lansing.
Back in 2007 a blogger commenting on the 40th anniversary of the Detroit race riots said the city could have been saved back then had the riots been “crushed without mercy or regret.” That phrase has stuck with me ever since. It’s one we should remember as the final collapse of the Yankee Empire looms.
Strider,
Thanks for catching that. I did get sloppy on that and I added an addendum to the piece at OD:
North does mention that Detroit is now 82% Black, but only in relation to dismissing the potential that employer discrimination was the root cause. He also mentions “flight”, but neither the who or the why.
As a racially conscious libertarian, I feel compelled to speak out about the inability of various writers here to recognize that not all libertarians are “atomistic individualists.” That’s a bit of strawman-bashing; I wouldn’t even say it describes people like Lew Rockwell (who is a sell-out, but that’s a different issue).
As an example of libertarians who do not shy away from the racial issues confronting Western Civilization, I heartily recommend The Last Ditch:
http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/home.htm
Libertarians are right to champion individual freedom and initiative, but they simply refuse to touch on race. If ‘socialism’ turns society into a Detroit, then all of Sweden should be a Detroit. But, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Heck, even communist nations of the Eastern Bloc nations during the Cold War weren’t …as horrible as Detroit. I WONDER WHY!!!! And does anyone think libertarianism will turn Liberia or Haiti in a rich stable paradise? Political and social systems do matter. Capitalism is better than socialism and communism, BUT it depends on WHO is practicing it.
I do a lot of contract work in the city of Detroit — exterior high rise work, good luck finding “minorities” that do this kind of work. I find Detroit blacks to be of a different sub-race within the greater “Black community.” Don’t know if it’s cultural or genetic. But it doesn’t matter if they’re rich or poor, they seem to have something about them that exudes negativity and blame “da man” for all their failures.
Blacks destroy any and all cities they inhabit, not just Detroit. Why? Because Sub-Saharan Africans are tens of thousands of years behind Caucasians and Asians evolutionary terms, and they haven’t yet evolved the ability to function well in urban areas as most White and Asian groups did a few thousand years ago.
Blacks have only been thrust in to mega-cities in the last 150 years or so — before they they of course lived almost exclusively in villages or small/medium-sized towns, or maybe a medium-sized city here and there (which was likely less of a city as we think of it and more just a larger collection of huts and houses in a general area).
Blacks do well in villages and small-towns based centered around extended family and when working in localized agriculture, ranching, hunting, and gathering — but they begin to degenerate rapidly when they are massed in cities. Simply put, Sub-Saharan brains are just not evolved enough in a ‘biosocial’ sense to handle the sheer complexity of modern urban living, most of it related to low-impulse control, inborn territorial instincts, and so on. Think about it: Blacks were taken from the darkest primitive jungles all the way to hyper-industrial Detroit in the span of a few hundred years — thus it’s no surprise they suffer in modern cities. These people still have their jungle instincts deeply embedded in them, still very fresh on their brains, and you expect them to thrive in modern cities?
I’d also argue that even many Whites and Asians aren’t fully evolved to tolerate urban life yet…I mean, they tolerate it well enough, but it still causes all different kinds of degeneration in the long-run: physical, psychological, social, etc. Hence we see that nearly all modern degeneracy flows forth from mass-cosmopolitanism, with the cities exporting as much cultural sewage as they do physical sewage to the countryside and small-towns they tower over.
It goes without saying that Jews are urban dwellers par excellence, and have been for a very long time — hence all of the degeneracy which flows from them and the cities they control.
Detroit was left to the Africans, the result should not surprise anyone, except those who believe race/ethnicity does not matter. Leave any environment to Africans and the result is the same.
With respect to anarchy/libertarians, I tend to think White people would quickly form systems which evolve into governments if somehow they were thrust into an anarchistic environment. I don’t see anarchy as compatible with White people. The great White societies seem to have the element of government with them.
Governments have a long track record with White people, we can see where it has succeeded and where it has failed. Successful Anarchy seems more like a hope pinned on theory rather than evidence from real life. Has there ever been an anarchistic White society that stayed anarchistic and succeeded — e.g. that advanced and produced great art and science ? (I don’t know — so, if there is I would like to know).
Terms like capitalism and socialism presuppose a populace capable of extending the division of labor into the realm of capital goods (goods which do not directly service needs but do so indirectly, through the production of goods which do service needs directly), with the question being over the nature of ownership of such goods. That capitalism is the ONLY such system capable of utilizing such goods should be very clear, both from theory and experience (socialism is by any measure an unbridled horror show). Black populations, left to themselves (ie, free of colonialist influence or expelled from White states) would doubtless revert to preindustrial, primitive status.
I agree that people like Gary North are pretty basically dishonest when they discuss these issues. I would also point out that there was a time when libertarians like Lew Rockwell would entertain more realistic discussions of race (check out the glorious old Rothbard-Rockwell Report; Rockwell’s current disavowal of the notorious Ron Paul Letters shows how far he has slid). Again: not all libertarians share Rockwell’s squeamishness here.
The government did not kill Detroit. The fact that the city is run by liberals and has a corrupt and oppressive bureaucracy is just a side effect of its racial makeup. I guarantee that if you put Rush Limbaugh and all of his neo-con buddies in charge of Detroit and let them slash taxes, end all regulation, etc., it would still be a hell hole.
Larry
“I guarantee that if you put Rush Limbaugh and all of his neo-con buddies in charge of Detroit and let them slash taxes, end all regulation, etc., it would still be a hell hole.”
Amen
Strider,
Your comment about crushing the riots resonated with me deeply.
The Union is going to collapse. It can’t be reformed. That is what we must hold onto and remember at all times.
Our only duty is to ensure that when it does collapse, we stop anything from stopping the future for our people.
If Europe or Russia is our future, we must stop whatever government takes over the reigns of the USA and poses a threat to our kinsman.
Look at the Flash Mobs in Philly or the Smash and Grab events in Atlanta.
This must be met with force, but is instead greeted with shocking indifference.
http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/2010/03/flash-mobs-in-philly-smash-and-grab-in.html
The choice is simple: separate now and prepare for nationwide events of this magnitude.
Gary North is a wide-eyed egalitarian at times (often using the Nazi/racist/eugenics bugaboo in his writings), but seems to know enough to come to the right conclusions: for example, he doesn’t recommend people live in “diverse” urban areas, but rather recommends they become integrated into a small (white) semi-rural town.
As for Rockwell and Paul, I think they are libertarians first and pragmatists second. The early Ron Paul letters showed their approach in the mid-90′s where they thought the Middle American Radicals were America’s Last Best Hope. They were willing to talk about race in an explicit way if that’s what it took to restore a libertarian society.
After Bosnia and Iraq, though, Rockwell became disillusioned with MARs because of their fanatical support of the regime’s wars. His seminal piece on that is called “Red State Fascists.” Their current strategy is to write off most of old, white Red America as too loyal to the regime to be revolutionary and appeal directly to young people and Leftists, which means dialing down the racial rhetoric. So now the same Ron Paul who called blacks savages in the LA riots complains about the incarceration rates of black men. Their objective is to discredit and deconstruct the regime using any propaganda available, including Leftist propaganda about the few things the regime should do (for example, keeping black criminals in prison). The shift has been remarkable, and I think it marks a tactical decision by the Mises people. For example, by contrast here is a statement by Rothbard on David Duke from the early 90s:
I think they are mistaken to write off Red State America. As uncomfortable as the Bush years were, the Obama administration is showing them to be every bit as radical as ever, hearkening back to the good old days of the mid and early 90s. Once the regime can no longer afford wars and a true environment of scarcity develops, I believe an explicit white nationalism will come to the fore.
There are a number of reasons for Rockwell’s shift to the left, but probably the biggest is simply the death of Rothbard, definitely more rightist-radical than Rockwell. In the vacuum, the usual influences set in.
Rockwell’s frustration with Middle America’s support of the regime’s wars is completely understandable. However, he himself shares much blame for failing to put forth a proper understanding of the nature of those wars, by erroneously emphasizing either ideological (a zeal to spread democracy) or material (access to oil resources) motivations for those wars. I.e., he is completely silent on the Jewish/Zionist role, in particular the reality of a fifth column in America, in orchestrating those wars.
How he hopes to win converts to his cause by fighting yesterday’s battles (i.e., over narrow economic policy issues rather than more fundamental preconditions for the existence of a free market, namely some kind of racial homogeneity) is beyond me.