You thought Atlas Shrugged was fiction?
By Daniel Hannan
Look at this description of Detroit from
today’s Observer:
What
isn’t dumped is stolen. Factories and homes have largely been stripped of
anything of value, so thieves now target cars’ catalytic converters. Illiteracy
runs at around 47%; half the adults in some areas are unemployed. In many
neighbourhoods, the only sign of activity is a slow trudge to the liquor store.
Now have a look at the uncannily
prophetic description of Starnesville, a Mid-Western town in Ayn Rand’s
dystopian novel, Atlas Shrugged.
Starnesville had been home to the great Twentieth Century Motor Company, but
declined as a result of socialism:
A
few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial
town. Everything that could move, had moved away; but some human beings had
remained. The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not
by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes
left in gutted cellars. It looked as if blind hands had seized whatever fitted
the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next
morning. The inhabited houses were scattered at random among the ruins; the
smoke of their chimneys was the only movement visible in town. A shell of
concrete, which had been a schoolhouse, stood on the outskirts; it looked like
a skull, with the empty sockets of glassless windows, with a few strands of
hair still clinging to it, in the shape of broken wires.
Beyond
the town, on a distant hill, stood the factory of the Twentieth Century Motor
Company. Its walls, roof lines and smokestacks looked trim, impregnable like a
fortress. It would have seemed intact but for a silver water tank: the water
tank was tipped sidewise.
They
saw no trace of a road to the factory in the tangled miles of trees and
hillsides. They drove to the door of the first house in sight that showed a
feeble signal of rising smoke. The door was open. An old woman came shuffling
out at the sound of the motor. She was bent and swollen, barefooted, dressed in
a garment of flour sacking. She looked at the car without astonishment, without
curiosity; it was the blank stare of a being who had lost the capacity to feel
anything but exhaustion.
“Can
you tell me the way to the factory?” asked Rearden.
The
woman did not answer at once; she looked as if she would be unable to speak
English. “What factory?” she asked.
Rearden
pointed. “That one.”
“It’s
closed.”
Now here’s the really extraordinary
thing. When Ayn Rand published those words in 1957, Detroit was, on most measures, the city with the highest
per capita GDP in the United States.
The real-life Starnesville, like the
fictional one, decayed slowly, then collapsed quickly. I spent a couple of
weeks in Detroit in 1991. The city was still functioning more or less normally,
but the early signs of decomposition were visible. The man I was staying within,
a cousin of my British travelling companion, ran a bar and restaurant. He
seemed to my teenage eyes to be the embodiment of the American dream: he had
never been to college, but got on briskly and uncomplainingly with building a
successful enterprise. Still, he was worried. He was, he told me, one of a
shrinking number of taxpayers sustaining more and more dependents. Maybe now,
he felt, was the time to sell up, while business was still good.
He wasn’t alone. The population of Motown
has fallen from two million to 700,000, and once prosperous neighbourhoods have
become derelict. Seventy six thousand homes have been abandoned; estate agents
are unable to shift three-bedroom houses for a dollar.
The Observer, naturally, quotes a native
complaining that ‘capitalism has failed us,’ but capitalism is the one thing
the place desperately needs. Detroit has been under Leftist administrations for
half a century. It has spent too much and borrowed too much, driving away
business and becoming a tool of the government unions.
Of Detroit’s $11 billion debt, $9 billion
is accounted for by public sector salaries and pensions. Under the mountain of
accumulated obligations, the money going into, say, the emergency services is
not providing services but pensions. Result? It takes the police an hour to
respond to a 911 call and two thirds of ambulances can’t be driven. This is a
failure, not of the private sector, but of the state. And, even now, the state is
fighting to look after its clients: a court struck down the bankruptcy
application on grounds that ‘will lessen the pension benefits of public
employees’.
Which brings us to the scariest thing of
all. Detroit could all too easily be a forerunner for the rest of the United
States. As Mark Steyn puts it in
the National Review:
Like
Detroit, America has unfunded liabilities, to the tune of $220 trillion,
according to the economist Laurence Kotlikoff. Like Detroit, it’s cosseting the
government class and expanding the dependency class, to the point where its
bipartisan “immigration reform” actively recruits 50–60 million low-skilled
chain migrants. Like Detroit, America’s governing institutions are increasingly
the corrupt enforcers of a one-party state — the IRS and Eric Holder’s
amusingly misnamed Department of Justice being only the most obvious examples.
Like Detroit, America is bifurcating into the class of “community organizers”
and the unfortunate denizens of the communities so organized.
Oh dear. No wonder the president would
rather talk about Trayvon Martin. If you want to see Obamanomics taken to its
conclusion, look at Starnesville. And tremble.
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