Dear reader, let us first and foremost establish a known fact as our guiding principle: the Principle of American Extremes.
Simply put, in the American culture and government, any law passed and program enacted will be taken to the absolute extreme. Note, I do not say logical extremes but absolute extreme, beyond any measure of logic or hint of common sense or wisdom.
Last week, an interesting story broke in the major UK paper called The Independent. The article described the new American initiative, started on a small scale but now championed by president Obama and taken to the whole of America: shrinkage of cities. How will cities shrink? Why through force of government and the demolition work, how else?
Our story begins in Flint, province of Michigan and formerly home to 200,000 people back in the 1960s. This suburb of Detroit, a satellite industrial small city, located only 90km from Detroit, has been shrinking along with its parent. The city's population is now approximately 115,000 people, or just about 60%. Obviously there are a lot of empty places in Flint, as well as Detroit and other cities, as American ideologues pushed the Marxist plank of Free Trade and destroyed the middle class that used to live there. This serves as the prime example of why Russia took the way of protectionism in the late 1990s and 2000s and grew its middle class, tripling the average income, but I digress. Back to Flint.
In Flint, over 1,100 homes have been destroyed and the government, through Imminent Domain, has "purchased" 3,000 more, slated for the same end. Why I state "purchased" is because in America, the government has a right to snatch property from its owners and pay them a "fair market" price, that is, one that the bureaucrats set themselves as fair. What plans the owner had of these "blighted" areas is not taken into account. The Soviet Union had laws like that, well actually, since the Soviets owned the land they did as they pleased with the buildings and private property on it, for the betterment of the State of course. Russia now has laws, though far from always enforced, to protect private property, which also can not be taxed, only the buildings built upon that private land can be taxed, never the land. Again, I digress. Back to Flint and as such, Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County (where Flint is located) has decided that for Flint to survive, it must shed, that is destroy, 40% of its buildings...controlled shrinkage.
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