I am going to keep hammering this point home:
Societies function best when the government priorities the safety and wellbeing of its law-abiding, productive, tax-paying core.
When governments fail to do so, chaos ensues.
We see this pattern bifurcate.
On the low end, this is frontier justice. When the law fails to protect the people, the people will take matters into their own hands.
On the high end, this is a revolution, like in France or Russia, where the people starved as the monarchy got fat.
Eventually, the law-abiding, productive, tax-paying core gets tired of being taken advantage of for their law-abiding, productive, work habits and they fight back.
The purpose of democracy is to make that fight bloodless. It gives these people an outlet and the ability to make change before things turn bloody.
What we are seeing in places like San Francisco is a total failure of this system.
A small number of professional activists hold all economic growth, especially for small businesses and the middle class, hostage. They know the systems of power and are able to devote themselves fulltime to crushing working people who have actual business to run.
This is an absolute disaster if your interest is how to run a city.
The law-abiding, productive, tax-paying core of the economy cannot be stamped out of existence by a handful of activists bankrolled by wealthy virtue-signaling leftists and grievance mongers.
In addition, the powers in San Francisco’s city government are entrenched. Largely because of the efforts of these same sorts of people.
While some law-abiding, productive, tax-paying people can move out of San Francisco, there are many there for who that is the city of their birth. That is where their families are. The intangibles make it difficult if not impossible to leave.
So if the powers that be are disinclined to change what happens next?
I can imagine one of these small business zoning fights ending when a professional activist type’s body is found in an alley.
San Francisco seems to be approaching Louis XVI level of instability, where an entrenched city government and an activist class get rich while destroying the lives of everyone else, and I don’t know how much longer that can last.
Interesting.
Re the video. Somehow I don’t think the housing crisis is the sole result of the sorts of building zone challenges the arcade owner encountered. It’s part of the problem, to be sure, but eliminating that piece will not solve the whole thing.
The thing about a city, it strikes me, is that if you aren’t continually trying to make it just a little bit better, it tends to gradually fall into a state of decay. That’s what some of these activists seem to miss – a caretaker mentality is, at the end of the day, a recipe for stagnation and decay. Change can be painful for a time, and there can be winners and losers; but if the entire city becomes a stagnant pond, there are no winners.
I often say that tyranny needs a supermajority to actually work.
Usually this happens because you have an obnoxious minority that everyone else is wiling to give up their rights in order to see them punished.
Currently, the Left is so caught up in their purity spiral that they cannot see the fact that they are making themselves into that obnoxious minority (being blinkered by a failed 19th century pseudoscientific economic cargo cult will do that).
Honestly, Florida Man, meth pipe in mouth and beer in hand, attempting something that is physically impossible while calling for his companions to observe- he’s put far more thought into the long term results of his actions.
Sarah Hoyt says one of the things that amazed her when she came to the US was Christmas decorations. Americans would put out decorations, and they wouldn’t be stolen over night.
We’re losing that society, and the people doing it think they’re good.
I didn’t understand the one guy’s complaint that it was near a school. The way some of these cities are laid out you are always within x feet of a school.