Motor City Meltdown

(Image by Nate Beeler)

Early last week, Detroit filed for bankruptcy.  Mark Steyn rolled-in on what the significance of Detroit's downfall means to us.  I love his historical comparisons with Hiroshima and the War of 1812. 

But such history, like literacy is lost on the denizens of Detroit, which Mark illustrates so well in Motown's Greatest Hit Jobs. 

Despite his expertise in foreign affairs, The Diplomad eloquenty shows us the Liberal Promised Land.

I never read Atlas Shrugged, but another of her books was required reading in high school (I can't remember the title).  It's certainly getting a lot of attention now, especially since the downfall of a great American city appears to have been foretold by Ayn Rand, if statism were to run its entire course.

Now Detroit is now Starnesville and if we continue on this path, the rest of our country will look like Detroit...

The Starnesville article generated the following comments:

Not really a Rand fan. Could not wade through Atlas Shrugged way back in high school. Still, this at least sounds prophetic.


Just looking at the size of Atlas Shrugged was enough to scare me off from reading it. But reading the chosen snippets commentators have been using have been quite eye opening.


It is a very long and sometimes trying book, but worth it. Although I think the Objectivisits are weirdos, there are a lot of good ideas in the book.


Aren’t there one or more movies about this?



Yes, but I've not watched them yet.


It's been a long time since I read Atlas Shrugged, but what I think I took away from it was the idea of how parasitism can destroy capitalism and free enterprise, and a lot of vivid demonstrations of how it would really work. But the one philosophical thing I really got personally was that working has value -- all work, even the most menial, helps build society. Without ditch diggers there's be no ditches, so to speak. It keeps me from looking down on blue collar workers, or those doing really sheit jobs. They need to be done and who am I to under-value their contributions. That sort of thing. It's a decent enough book and worth reading, if you can make the slog, though Rand's (Ayn's, but also Paul's) libertarianism goes to far, in my mind. She does, grudgingly, accept the need for a military, though just barely...

An attitude appears to have developed in the US that blue collar jobs are some sort of mark of failure. This is not a good thing. In part, it drives this crack brained idea about “jobs Americans won’t do.” Heck, most of the jobs I used to do as summer work are now basically career work for day laborers.  We need to quit this. That, and figure out a way to get rid of the two parties that are perfectly, if not gleefully, willing to destroy the social, political and economic fabric of this nation for short-sighted political goals (cheap votes and cheap labor).

I haven't seen the movies either, but it looks like Part III will hit the theaters next year. 

I wonder if the producers will re-edit the movies and substitute "Starnesville" with "Detroit?"