Conservative ideas are responsible for the two great urban-policy successes of the last quarter-century: the breathtaking drops in crime and welfare dependency since the early 1990s. You'd never know it from members of the opinion elite, however, who have rarely recognized these successes, much less their provenance. So let's recapitulate an epic battle about the foundations of social order, a battle that had not just a clear winner but also a clear loser: the liberal policy prescriptions for cities that many opinion makers and politicians still embrace. New York City has been at the centre of this battle because so many of the bad ideas that wreaked havoc on cities hatched there. Fortunately, so did many of the antidotes.
Liberal urban policy was based on several core assumptions. Number One: multi-generational poverty was the result of structural forces -- above all, of rapacious capitalism and racism. It could never be the result of bad decision-making or a deficit of personal responsibility. Number Two: though men were still, alas, required for conceiving a child, they were purely optional for raising one. (Corollary: the role of illegitimacy in creating and perpetuating poverty could never be acknowledged.) Number Three: low-wage work was demeaning and pointless. It was better to receive a monthly welfare check than to labour at an entry-level job. Number Four: crime was an understandable and inevitable reaction to economic injustice and discrimination. (Corollary: the police could not lower crime; only government social programs and wealth-redistribution schemes could.) Together, these four conceits composed the most dangerous idea of all: that the bourgeois values of order, self-discipline and respect for the law were decorative afterthoughts to prosperity, rather than its very precondition.
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Conservatives+Saved+Metropolis/4154039/story.html#ixzz1ByBTOKWD
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