Thanks once again to The Other McCain for the Rule Five linkery!

Who Lost the Cities?  Excerpt:

Philadelphia, for example, has not had a Republican mayor since the Truman administration. It did enjoy the services of Mayor Frank Rizzo, a Democrat who endorsed Nixon in exchange for federal handouts and who governed in the progressive style: He converted a private utility into a public one and promptly turned it into a patronage machine, he was close with the labor unions and raised the city’s wage tax to fund spending on transportation and infrastructure projects, worked for economic benefits for the elderly, etc. He was a classic welfare-statist Democrat — and a man who, as police commissioner, famously promised to “make Attila the Hun look like a fag.” (Rizzo later ran as a Republican.) It wasn’t a right-wing radical who bombed a Philadelphia rowhouse and burned down the neighborhood — it was an African-American progressive, Wilson Goode. Closet Ayn Rand fans have not been running the affairs of Detroit all these years, and the intellectual patrons of the Chicago Boys have had approximately zero influence on the municipal affairs of Chicago. Ralph Reed will never be the mayor of San Francisco.

There is a correlation here that is strong enough it is hard to discount to probability of causation:  Progressive urban politics leads to a loss of economic opportunity, the diminishing of personal responsibility and, eventually, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles.

Anyone living in or near any of our major cities should be living in fear of the day the Imperial Federal government finally realizes we are broke, and that the endless stream of wealth transfer payments have to stop.

Our major cities will destroy themselves in a matter of weeks.