For a lot of us, Seattle used to seem different from other big cities. It was part of the West and infused with the rugged individualism that came from surviving the frontier. But that was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
Now Seattle is just one more liberal re-education center dedicated to social justice and economic suicide. Its dominance in statewide politics has turned Washington state into a Democratic stronghold and an ongoing experiment in wealth redistribution. As a result it has seen an “Atlas Shrugged” level of increase in homelessness, and an accompanying increase in hand-wringing as the leftists look for solutions to the social problem they caused without ever admitting their own guilt.
Author Christopher Rufo has written a devastating article entitled “Seattle Under Siege” that lays out the evidence that the homelessness in Seattle is not a result of capitalist cruelty, but an inevitable result of the liberal social policies that turn people into commodities.
As Rufo writes: “Using homelessness as a symbol of ‘capitalism’s moral failure,’ the socialists hope to build support for their agenda of rent control, public housing, minimum-wage hikes, and punitive corporate taxation. … What the socialists won’t, or can’t, see is that their agenda cannot solve the homelessness crisis.”
Rufo, who is executive director for the Documentary Foundation and a research fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Wealth & Poverty, aptly blames Seattle’s growing homeless problem on what he calls “the compassion brigades and the homeless-industrial complex.”
The is really intelligent analysis and thus almost sure to be ignored just as the warnings of Ayn Rand have been ignored for the past 75 years. Face it, the compassion argument can’t be overturned by logic because it isn’t based on logic in the first place. But for those of you who want to understand the decline of Western civilization, it is highly recommended.
For more of my own analysis of the collapse of the United States, please take a look at the “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy at Amazon, the first three volumes of the Heartland Diary USA series.
