National Solutions To Local Problems

A friend of a friend offered a comment about the resounding silence on the 44 shootings and nine homicides in Chicago one particular weekend.

In response, my friend made this observation:

We don't live in a first world country. We live in a mix of the first world and the third. The part that is first world is safe, stable, and prosperous. The part that is third world is a dangerous poverty trap, with drugs and gangs. Its murder rate looks very much like the murder rate of Mexico. When we talk about the high murder rate of any large city, we have to understand that that murder rate is an average of neighborhoods that have no murders and neighborhoods where people die every other night.

This is spot-on, and applies more broadly to, well, almost everything. Cities and states across America are extremely heterogeneous within themselves, which just amplifies the heterogeneity of the nation.

Another friend once stated his politics as:

Government should be as local as possible.

It (and he) is not libertarian per se, but the principle is an apt overlay to libertarianism as well as more statist forms of governance.

Subject to the bedrock principles of liberty and the protections in the Constitution, that which can be addressed locally should not be addressed state-wide, and that which can be addressed by a state government should not be the Feds's playground.

Unfortunately, our cultural elites haven't gotten this message. I recalled all this recently when I read of Nikole Hannah-Jones, she of the 1619 project, dismissing a woman's safety concerns about commuting nowadays on NYC's subway.

Therein lies a constant and often intractable problem. The people who claim moral right to define policies in order to address problems they perceive (real or imagined) live apart from the places where the effects of those policies are felt. This is an extension of Thomas Sowell's pithy observation about authority and consequence.

In days of yore, there was a phrase, "limousine liberals," used to describe the hypocrisy of those who don't practice what they preach. The origin derived from people preaching the merits of public transpiration while being chauffeured around in Town Cars and the like. Today, the poster children are the global warming scolds who fly private jets to their "save the planet" conferences, but the concept applies far more broadly, to include the aforementioned public safety matters. Celebrities, politicians, and other Important People demanding gun prohibition while standing amidst their personal armed security are even more hypocritical as the Green jet-setters.

The corollary problem is that these folks aren't content with setting policies for their localities. If they left us alone, we could simply laugh at their hypocrisy. Instead, they insist their view of how things work should be imposed on the nation as a whole, when they're not demanding it of the entire planet (though, there's hypocrisy even there - the Greens scold the West but ignore the environmental depravity of China, Russia, and other non-Western nations).

Many, myself included, have preached federalism as the best way for Leftists to achieve their grand visions and reshape the societies in which they live. Make your own locality as you wish, subject as I mentioned before to the strictures and protections of the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights. It'd be a whole lot easier than trying to press Red America through their Play Doh Fun Factories, and they'd achieve SO many more of their goals.

So, why do our Best-and-Brightest insist on national policies, or on one-size-fits-all "solutions" when we find so much disparity even in smaller cities, let alone major metropolises?

The list of reasons is long, and it's not flattering, but rather than dogpile, I will instead entreat - again - those who think that Washington should be running all our lives to reconsider. And, to take a tiny taste of humble pie. Try embracing the premise of equality, rather than presuming those not of your social or educational caste are to be managed. What can be managed locally, should not involve the state government. What can be managed by the state government, should not be usurped by DC.

The exception: Our government's core mission - to protect individual's rights and liberties. The Bill of Rights, and its extender the Fourteenth Amendment, protects citizens - all citizens - from governments - federal, state, and local. If local governments violate those rights, state governments should intervene. If state governments do, it's the proper role of the Federal government to correct.

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Peter.