By Kevin D. Williamson
There are many horrific
stories to be told about the implosion of Detroit, once the nation’s
most prosperous city, today its poorest. There is the story of its
corrupt public institutions, its feckless leaders, its poisonous racial
politics, its practically nonexistent economy, the riots that have led
to its thrice being occupied by federal troops. The most horrific story
may be that of the death of its children.
Detroit has the highest child-mortality rate of any
American city, exceeding that of many parts of what we used to call the
Third World. The rate of death before the age of 18 in Detroit is nearly
three times New York City’s, and its infant-mortality rate exceeds that
of Botswana. The main cause of premature death among the children of
Detroit is premature birth — the second is murder. While the city’s
murder rate among adults is nothing to be proud of, more horrifying is
the fact that between 30 and 40 children are murdered in
Detroit in a typical year. Some of those children are nine-month-olds
killed by rifle fire in their beds; some are budding criminals in their
late teens — and each of those situations offers its own unique horrors.
So dangerous is the city that children are being armed by their
parents, which has predictable consequences. “I work in the Wayne County
Juvenile Court, and these children are obtaining guns from adults,”
children’s-law attorney Lynda White told the Detroit News, which has been conducting an in-depth investigation
of how Detroit’s children are dying. “They’re obtaining guns illegally
from people who are supposed to be responsible and people who are
supposed to protect them. And if that person who has a huge influence in
your life is giving you a gun, some of them tend to think it’s okay to
carry it. And they’re being told, ‘You need this for your protection,
you live in Detroit.’”
Detroit represents nothing less than progressivism in
its final stage of decadence: Worried that unionized public-sector
workers are looting your city? Detroit is already bankrupt, unable to
provide basic services expected of it — half the streetlights don’t
work, transit has been reduced, neighborhoods go unpatrolled. Worried
that public-sector unions are ruining your schools? Detroit’s were
ruined a generation or more ago, the results of which are everywhere to
be seen in the city. Worried that Obamacare is going to ruin our
health-care markets? General-practice physicians are hard to find in
Detroit, and those willing to accept Medicaid — which covers a great
swath of Detroit’s population — are rarer still. Worried about the
permissive culture? Four out of five of Detroit’s children are born out
of wedlock. Worried that government is making it difficult for
businesses to thrive? Many people in Detroit have to travel miles to
find a grocery store. This is the endgame of welfare economics: What
good is Medicaid if there are no doctors? What good are food stamps
where there is no food? What good are “free” schools if you’re so afraid
to send your children there that you feel it prudent to arm them first?
Detroit is what Democrats do. The last Republican
elected mayor of Detroit took office during the Eisenhower
administration. The decay of Detroit is not the inevitable outcome of
the decline of the automotive industry: The automotive industry is
thriving in the United States — but not in Detroit. It isn’t white
flight: The black middle class has left Detroit as fast as it can. The
model of Detroit politics is startlingly familiar in its fundamentals,
distinguished only by its degree of advancement: Advance the interests
of public-sector unions and politically connected business cronies,
expand the relative size of the public sector remorselessly — and when
opposed, cry “Racism!” When people vote with their feet, cry “Racism!”
When the budget just won’t balance, cry “Racism!” Never mind that the
current mayor of Detroit is the first non–African American to hold that
job since the 1970s, or that, as one Detroit News columnist put
it, “black nationalism . . . is now the dominant ideology of the [city]
council” — somewhere, there must be a somebody else to blame,
preferably: aged, portly, white, male, and Republican. No less a fool
than Ed Schultz blamed the straits of this exemplar of Democratic
single-party rule on “a lot of Republican policies.” Melissa
Harris-Perry, “America’s leading public intellectual,” blames Detroit’s
problems on its conservatism and small government, oblivious to the fact
that Detroit maintains twice as many city employees per resident as do
larger cities such as Fort Worth and Indianapolis, and three times as
many as liberal San Jose.
The result of all that municipal “investment”? For
children newborn through age 18, Detroit sees 120 deaths per 100,000
each year — a rate 26 percent higher than second-place child-killer
Philadelphia. That’s nearly two and a half times the rate in Los
Angeles, which isn’t exactly a leafy suburban paradise. Every time our
progressive friends come to us with another idea for transferring wealth
from the productive economy to them and their friends, they scold us:
“Think of the children!” But those who resist their efforts to do to the
country at large what they have done to Detroit are thinking of the
children.
There used to be a popular bumper sticker reading, “War
Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.” War is hell,
Detroit merely hellish. The difference is, we don’t send children off to
war.
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