One of the big themes of this blog over the years has been chronicling the counter-productive results of various progressive government schemes for perfecting the world — everything from “anti-poverty” programs, to “affordable” housing, to energy restrictions in the name of the “climate,” to punitive tax rates on high earners, and so on and on.
My general observation has been that all of these things inevitably fail to ameliorate the problem they are supposed to address, and instead bring about gradual economic and societal decline in the jurisdictions that try them. Decades into the effort, places that have continuously followed the progressive prescriptions have turned into what I have called the “basket case” cities — cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and many more, that have seen a long term of premium taxes and large “caring” bureaucracies, but accompanied by inadequate private investment, shortage of good jobs, declining populations and high rates of crime and violence.
But at least the declines of these places have generally been gradual — often so gradual that the people living through the decline can barely perceive it. Not so with the latest progressive fad, the movement to “defund the police” and otherwise withdraw political support for assertive policing, theoretically replacing that with some kind of “new paradigm” of social workers or something.
The defunding movement, and related initiatives, has been followed by sudden and dramatic jumps in the rates of violent crime, particularly murders, in the progressive jurisdictions. The overall result has been thousands of additional deaths, mostly of young black men. This could be the most counter-productive progressive policy yet.
