The Failure of Urban Liberalism

Joel Kotkin and David Friedman remind us that modern day urban liberalism is a failure in more ways than one:

That the governments of New Orleans and Louisiana, long dominated by Democrats, are corrupt and ineffective is of course widely recognized. But the problems in New Orleans went beyond mere corruption; the city's civic culture and public institutions have, for years, been under siege. Among those public institutions was the criminal justice system: Even as crime rates have fallen throughout the country, the number of violent crimes in New Orleans was rising well before the storm. (This year alone there had already been 192 homicides by mid-August. That's 23 more than in mid-August 2004.) In recent years, a New Orleans resident was nearly ten times more likely than the average American to be murdered. So it was no surprise that many members of a police force long considered among the least effective in the United States would desert their city in a time of crisis, or, worse still, reportedly participate in the looting. Even before Katrina, New Orleans residents were often reluctant to assist with prosecutions because they feared retaliation and distrusted the local justice system.

Read the whole piece it's well worth your time.