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The failure of Libertarian "paradise" Colorado Springs
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:37 pm
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:37 pm
LINK
A really interesting piece on how drastic cuts and libertarian ideals did more damage than just keeping with the "status quo" that so many hate.
It also demolishes the idea that government should be run like a business.
quote:
There has been a lot of this kind of reckoning over the past half-decade. From crisis came a desire for disruption. From disruption came, well, too much disruption. And from that came a full-circle return to professional politicians. Including one—a beloved mayor and respected bureaucrat who was short-listed to replace James Comey as FBI director—who is so persuasive he has gotten Colorado Springs residents to do something the outside world assumed they were not capable of: Five years after its moment in the spotlight, revenue is so high that the same voters who refused to keep the lights on have overwhelmingly approved ballot measures allowing the city to not only keep some of its extra tax money, but impose new taxes as well.
In the process, many residents of Colorado Springs, but especially the men and women most committed to making the city thrive, have learned a few other lessons. That perpetual chaos can be exhausting. That the value of the status quo rises with the budget’s bottom line. And that it helps when the people responsible for running the city are actually talking with one another. All it took was a few years running an experiment that everyone involved seems happy is over.
A really interesting piece on how drastic cuts and libertarian ideals did more damage than just keeping with the "status quo" that so many hate.
It also demolishes the idea that government should be run like a business.
This post was edited on 7/13/17 at 1:40 pm
23
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:39 pm to tigerinDC09
Freedom requires vigilance. When you get tired of fighting and start letting down your guard, that's when you start losing.
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:42 pm to tigerinDC09
Yeah, we get it. Socialism is the only way.
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:42 pm to tigerinDC09
Colorado Springs wasn't truly libertarian, vaping wasn't allowed in movie theaters and moms could still force their sons to go to church
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:44 pm to upgrayedd
quote:
Yeah, we get it. Socialism is the only way.
No, the lesson you should learn is that democracy is hard. It takes knowledge and experts, not political novices who say everything is easy to fix.
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:44 pm to tigerinDC09
quote:
Take the streetlights. Turning them off had saved the city about $1.25 million. What had not made the national news stories was what had happened while those lights were off. Copper thieves, emboldened by the opportunity to work without fear of electrocution, had worked overtime scavenging wire. Some, the City Council learned, had even dressed up as utility workers and pried open the boxes at the base of streetlights in broad daylight. Keeping the lights off might have saved some money in the short term, but the cost to fix what had been stolen ran to some $5 million.
You can translate this as "dopeheads and sorry-arse drug addicts."
Shoot a few of those motherfrickers while they are in the act of stealing ... and the message would have been sent to the rest.
That doesn't mean that saving money with no lights was a bad idea.
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:45 pm to upgrayedd
quote:
Yeah, we get it. Socialism is the only way.
If only there was a way to balance the good things about free market capitalism with the good things about socialism to create a thriving economy...
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:46 pm to tigerinDC09
quote:
No, the lesson you should learn is that democracy is hard. It takes knowledge and experts, not political novices who say everything is easy to fix.
Who says everything is easy to fix?
God forbid we run an efficient government that gets the most out of every cent collected, right? That's, like, such an outdated concept.
This post was edited on 7/13/17 at 1:54 pm
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:48 pm to navy
quote:
sorry-arse drug addicts."
Gotta steal copper to buy weed brah
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:48 pm to tigerinDC09
quote:
A ballot amendment approved by voters a year earlier had taken power away from the City Council and given it to the mayor. Now that mayor happened to be someone who felt that political compromise was a dirty word. Shortly after the election, two top council members asked Bach to give them a detailed weekly report just as the previous city manager had done. He said no. The mayor wouldn’t answer to anyone. The council, he indicated, would answer to him
Well, this is certainly not a libertarian set up
quote:
For those who opposed Bach, the political newcomer was doing damage by firing longstanding department heads without consulting anyone beforehand. Jan Martin, then the council’s pro-tem president, said she heard of Bach’s firing of the city’s police chief by word of mouth, rather than from Bach himself. “He was draining the city of all of this accumulated knowledge,” she says. Hazlehurst, watching from the sidelines, is more succinct. “Bach’s dysfunction and [the] council’s dysfunction were intimately related,” he says. “It was just a rookie government.”
There was a price to pay for Bach’s imperiousness and lack of diplomacy, and this is something about which he and his critics agree to some extent. Job creation, which had been a pillar of Bach’s campaign, never got up the steam that he had promised and, by his own admission, lagged other similarly sized cities in the region like Albuquerque, Omaha and Oklahoma City. He never managed to get the business tax repealed. And his signature plan to boost tourism with a multipronged project of museums and an outdoor stadium ran into headwinds from a council that said it wasn’t sufficiently involved in the planning.
And this seems like more of a failure of the mayor and the local government than libertarian ideals
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:48 pm to tigerinDC09
quote:Democracy by definition doesn't require experts. Democracy puts decisions in the hands of voters, the vast majority of whom are neither knowledgeable nor holding any expertise.
It takes knowledge and experts,
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:49 pm to cahoots
quote:
the good things about socialism
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:50 pm to Salmon
quote:
And this seems like more of a failure of the mayor and the local government than libertarian ideals
Shhh. Thats too obvious
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:51 pm to tigerinDC09
quote:
For those who opposed Bach, the political newcomer was doing damage by firing longstanding department heads without consulting anyone beforehand. Jan Martin, then the council’s pro-tem president, said she heard of Bach’s firing of the city’s police chief by word of mouth, rather than from Bach himself. “He was draining the city of all of this accumulated knowledge,” she says. Hazlehurst, watching from the sidelines, is more succinct. “Bach’s dysfunction and [the] council’s dysfunction were intimately related,” he says. “It was just a rookie government.”
quote:
He never managed to get the business tax repealed. And his signature plan to boost tourism with a multipronged project of museums and an outdoor stadium ran into headwinds from a council that said it wasn’t sufficiently involved in the planning.
quote:
By 2015, the final year of his term, Bach was no longer talking to any member of City Council, save for Bennett. Both sides were fighting proxy battles in the middle of council meetings, quibbling over the sorts of things—moving money from one government account to another to pay bills—that would normally be routine.
i think "Libertarian" is the wrong word to use, especially when the downfall appears to be the "old guard" in government trying to protect their own and their power (which is striking when you look at the examples of how they utterly fricked things up in the first place)
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:51 pm to Salmon
Didn't Sandy Springs, GA privatize most of their govt and get pretty good results?
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:51 pm to tigerinDC09
You don't get it. Local government should be free to be whatever it wants to be. You as an individual can impact your local government. You cannot impact the Federal one.
The problem is that we have a behemoth of a Federal Government. We live in a nanny state where we pay more in taxes than the average medieval serf. And we have no say in how those taxes are spent.
If we did not have such a large and onerous Federal Govt, then local governments like Colorado Springs would not have had to resort to such extreme measures to keep afloat.
The problem is that we have a behemoth of a Federal Government. We live in a nanny state where we pay more in taxes than the average medieval serf. And we have no say in how those taxes are spent.
If we did not have such a large and onerous Federal Govt, then local governments like Colorado Springs would not have had to resort to such extreme measures to keep afloat.
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:52 pm to tigerinDC09
quote:
democracy is hard. It takes knowledge and experts, not political novices who say everything is easy to fix
and, apparently, it takes those "experts", who created a system that was failing, to bitch and obstruct change
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:53 pm to cahoots
quote:
the good things about socialism
i need an exhaustive list
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:53 pm to cahoots
quote:That's called free market capitalism.
If only there was a way to balance the good things about free market capitalism with the good things about socialism to create a thriving economy
1 + 0 = 1
Posted on 7/13/17 at 1:54 pm to SlowFlowPro
Starvation has to be up there near the top
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