Saturday, August 13, 2016
Sara Pratt, Legal Bulldog on Enforcing AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing) across America
If you really want to understand the mind of a legal bulldog that will be suing cities and towns across America, listen to former HUD enforcement official, Sara Pratt. She spoke at the Marin Fair Housing Conference in April 2016 but the videotape of her presentation was not published. Here is a speech she gave around the same time at recent housing conference in Tennessee discussing strategies to force AFFH everywhere.
GENTRIFICATION SPOTLIGHT: How Portland is Pushing Out Its Black Residents
GENTRIFICATION SPOTLIGHT: How Portland is Pushing Out Its Black Residents
Between its alarming legacy of racism and its skyrocketing rents, Portland, Oregon, has become one of the country's worst examples of Black displacement and gentrification. What will it take for this hipster heartland to live up to its warm and fuzzy reputation?
Abigail Savitch-Lew APR 18, 2016 1:35PM EDT
Anti-gentrification grafitti in Portland, Oregon
Photo: Tony Webster/Flickr
Update on 4-20-16: Portland native Marih Alyn-Claire has notified Colorlines that after months of seraching she has found an affordable apartment in the city.
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Marih Alyn-Claire, a Black 64-year-old Portland, Oregon, native, is afraid she will soon be homeless. Last summer, she learned that her rent would rise by several hundred dollars in June 2016, but so far she hasn’t found a decent apartment that she can afford. “I’ve watched the redlining here. I’ve lived through discrimination myself," she said at an emergency housing forum with state representatives and senators in January. "But I’ve always been able to get a place."
Until now.
Alyn-Claire lives on Social Security Disability insurance and pays for part of her housing costs with a federal Section 8 voucher. In recent years, though, Portland rents have skyrocketed and the federal government’s voucher program hasn’t kept apace—leaving tenants like her to shoulder the cost or meet the streets.
There is no one story of displacement in Portland. Among the 30 others who testified at the January emergency housing hearing was a working-class mother pushed out, a copywriter evicted and grappling with doubled rent costs, and a domestic violence service provider having trouble finding emergency housing for clients.
Despite what's happening, Portland is not widely known as an expensive city. Rather, it is seen as a haven for creatives and nonconformists, the place that the popular comedy "Portlandia" famously deemed "the city where young people go to retire." The New York Timesencourages tourists to “ignore the hype, and indulge in the city’s simple pleasures—from $4 films to a puppet museum” or enjoy “shockingly affordable” delicious eats. Yet Portland is quickly becoming accessible only to the wealthiest iconoclasts. Since 2010, rents have increased an average of 20 percent, the sixth-fastest rise in the nation after cities like New York and San Jose. In 2015, Portland ranked first in the country for the percentage of land tracts identified as gentrifying by Governing Magazine.
With rent hikes of more than 15 percent in the third quarter of 2015, tenant organizations began calling the months of July and August “the summer of evictions.” There’s been a vast increase in the number of single-person households living in Central City, the urban core—often college graduates attracted by Portland’s relative affordability and hip reputation. And thanks to state laws that prohibit policies used to regulate other pricey cities, Portland tenants are vulnerable to limitless rent increases.
New White Majorities in Traditionally Black Neighborhoods
The media has paid a lot of attention to the White artists affected by the rent crisis, the “urban pioneers” ditching Portland in search of greater affordability and a more authentic cultural scene. But Portland’s people of color—and particularly, Black residents—have been hardest hit.
While White Portland has more than rebounded since the last recession, poverty in the Black community has worsened. From 2000 to 2013, White incomes grew from about $55,000 to $60,000; Black incomes fell from $35,000 to less than $30,000. A report published last April by the Portland Housing Bureau revealed there is not a single neighborhood in the city where an average African-American can afford a two-bedroom apartment.
Black Portlanders suffer enormously from this catastrophic combination of falling incomes and rising housing costs. In 2015, the number of homeless Black people grew by 48 percent. Though they make up only 7 percent of Portland residents, Black people constitute a disproportionate 25 percent of the homeless population.
While the entire city is facing the stress of rising rents, Portland’s Black community has grappled with gentrification for more than a decade. From 2000 to 2010, the city’s core lost 10,000 Black residents. In the historically Black neighborhoods of the Northeast such as King, Woodlawn and Boise-Eliot, Whites became the new majority in most census tracts.
“This is a critical moment for us as a state ... as we’re faced with quite possibly the most far-reaching and devastating housing crisis in Oregon’s history due to unprecedented rent increases,” Katrina Holland, deputy director of the Community Alliance of Tenants, said at the January hearing with politicians. The crisis, she said, ravages “people who look like me, African-American, and Native Americans, on top of generations of racially motivated, dramatic displacements.”
The Racial Failure of 'New Urbanism'
The housing crunch Portland is suffering is happening in cities across the country. White millennials, eager to live close to where they work and access the cultural vibrancy of city life, are driving up demand for housing and displace Black and Latino residents from the neighborhoods they helped to build. One study of 11 metropolitan areas found that from 2000 to 2010 there was an increase in the Black population living outside the urban core in each city. While some Black homeowners may sell their houses and leave the city for better opportunities, tenants are often unable to afford to live in rejuvenated neighborhoods. Other Black homeowners are bought out by eager investors, only to find that they are unable to rent or purchase housing elsewhere.
Portland, a city already abnormally White due to a history of racial exclusion and forced removal of Black residents, is a dramatic example of a nationwide problem.
With its municipal compost system and bike-friendly streets, Portland is a model for the nation of “new urbanism”—a vision of thriving neighborhoods with low carbon footprints. Yet some say that the city has failed to invest sufficiently in the livelihoods of Black residents, depriving them of the opportunity to enjoy recent public investments in the landscape.
“If Portland is trying to be this model of sustainable, livable, walkable, 20-minute cities, and it’s not racially diverse and it’s not class diverse, we’ve got big problems about what that means for anywhere else,” says Lisa Bates, a professor of urban planning at Portland State University. “Is it only viable to use public resources to create a favorable environment if you get rid of all the undesirable people?”
Portland officials say they value class and racial diversity, and are making efforts to address the larger city crisis. Last October, the city, along with Los Angeles, Seattle and the state of Hawaii, declared a housing and homeless state of emergency, enacting measures to open new shelters, legalize homeless encampments and set aside funding for affordable housing. In Portland, the ordinance allowed the city to broaden its current focus on homeless veterans to the city’s growing number of women and families with no place to live. Affordable housing advocates recognize the declaration as a step toward addressing the rent crisis.
Yet will Portland actually get to the roots of housing displacement in Portland’s Black community—roots that run deep, that go back centuries?
Jim Crow, Portland Style
Michelle Lewis, a therapist with connections to Black residents throughout Portland, can see the links between the city’s history of racial exclusion, her clients’ housing instability and her own hardship. Since she and her husband lost their home to predatory lending during the recession, she says, they have been forced to move five times—most recently, beyond the city limits—as a result of rent increases and racial discrimination.
“We’ve felt like nomads,” she says.
Oregon’s first Black residents may have felt similarly. In the 1840s, the territory passed laws prohibiting Blacks from living in the state and punishing those who tried to remain with whiplashes and expulsion. In 1858, Oregon became the only state in the country admitted with a clause in its constitution excluding Blacks. As a result, Oregon’s Black population grew slowly—and those who stayed navigated Jim Crow-style segregation.
Lewis’ grandfather came to Portland during World War II. During that time, the Kaiser Company imported thousands of Whites and Blacks from across the country to build tanks and cargo ships. White Portlanders, averse to the growing Black population, confined most of the migrants to a new development called Vanport, built on a flood plane by the Columbia River.
“That’s where we had to live at,” Lewis recalls her grandparents explaining. “If you worked downtown, you had to be over in that area by a certain time, or else you could be fined, you could be jailed.” (While there is no official record of the so-called “sundown laws” in Oregon, there is a rich oral history detailing how towns jailed Black people for appearing after dark, especially in southern Oregon.)
After the war, Portland residents wanted to get rid of Vanport and developers hoped to reclaim the property for parkland and manufacturing use. In 1948, they got their wishes: After city officials failed to warn residents of rising river levels, the dikes broke, flooding Vanport and killing 13 people. Lewis’ family lost their home in the flood.
Like many other Black residents of Vanport, the Lewis family settled in the Albina neighborhood of the Northeast, one of the only areas of the city where realtors would sell to Blacks. As White residents fled to the suburbs, banks redlined the neighborhood, depriving Black tenants of the opportunity to obtain mortgages and build home equity, while investors purchased homes with cash and let them sit empty. With the city turning a blind eye and rising poverty, crime and unemployment, White Portlanders began to view Albina as a dangerous slum.
Yet when Lewis looks back on her childhood in Albina, she remembers a close-knit community and good times spent on friends’ porches, climbing fruit trees and playing four-corner kickball. “We would play outside all day ‘til the streetlights came on,” she recalls. “You could go and knock on your neighbors door—my mom would say, go and knock Mrs. Shirley’s [door], I need an egg. ... You knew everybody in the neighborhood.”
Instead of nurturing this community, the Portland Development Commission launched numerous “urban renewal” projects with the purported goal of addressing blight. Aiming to convert the land to commercial and industrial uses, the city displaced hundreds of residents to build a sports arena, expand a hospital, and construct two new highways.
By the 1970s, public outcry against “urban renewal” caused officials to change course: The city let the area remain residential and supported local initiatives to revitalize housing and streetscapes. Yet Black Portlanders were still shut out. White people with higher incomes returned to the Northend, causing rents to rise and uprooting many Black businesses and about one in every four Black residents.
With the loss of many members of this community has come the loss of history, leading to the false perception that Portland is naturally White, or that uncontrollable market forces bear sole responsibility for the displacement. For Lewis, the erasure is painful.
“It’s a horrible feeling, to come to a neighborhood where you grow up in, and have the people there look at you as if you don’t belong,” she says. She recalls Little Chapel of the Chimes, the funeral home where she buried her grandfather.
Litttle Chapel of the Chimes is now a craft beer pub.
Find out what Portland's people of color are doing about the city's runaway rents in Part 2 of this gentrification spotlight.
Abigail Savitch-Lew is a housing reporter and fiction writer from Brooklyn, New York. She is a frequent contributor to City Limits and is also published in YES! Magazine, Jacobin, In These Times, Truthout, The Nation and Dissent Magazine.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Journalism
The newspaper industry is suffering. That’s bad news for journalists — both real and fictional.
Digital First Media owns the Marin IJ, and most of the newspapers in the Bay Area.
Friday, August 12, 2016
Chalk a Sidewalk, Go to Jail
Chalk a Sidewalk, Go to Jail
MAP: Across the nation, police are arresting adults and even citing kids for temporary drawings.
Cuff 'em! Flash200/Flickr
"I draws what I like and I like what I drew!" sings Bert, the affable sidewalk artist in Disney's Mary Poppins. He doesn't know how easy he's got it. If Bert lived in one of a dozen American cities, his colorful chalk drawings of boats and circus animals could very well land him in jail.
Take the recent example of Susan Mortensen, 29-year-old mom in Richmond, Virginia. In March, Mortensen was arrested for allowing her four-year-old daughter to draw on rocks at a local park with sidewalk chalk. This month a judge sentenced her to 50 hours of community service helping to strip and repaint 200 boundary posts on a bridge. Mortensen told a local TV station that her daughter is now "very nervous around cops" and "very scared of chalk."
That's not all. One week ago in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, police cited two teenagers for decorating a street with chalk renditions of a whale and a sea turtle. The kids must now appear in court and pay a fine to be determined by a district judge. James Donnelly, Doylestown's police chief, told a local newspaper that the chalking was "an attempt at vandalism" that could lead to the use of more permanent materials.
Chalk. The gateway art supply.
These are not isolated incidents. Over the past five years, at least 50 people in 17 American cities have run afoul of authorities for coloring things with chalk. The vast majority were arrested in connection with drawing designs or messages on public streets or sidewalks. Those accused of chalk vandalism range from the "Chalking 8"—who were asking for trouble when they drew anti-cop slogans on the wall of the police station in Manchester, New Hampshire—to six-year-old Natalie Shea, who received a New York City graffiti warning that carries a possible $300 fine for marring her stoop in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood with a blue chalk scribble. (A spokesperson for Crayola, the leading maker of sidewalk chalk, did not return a phone call seeking comment.)
The war on chalk's most active front as of late has been Los Angeles, where police have arrested numerous chalk-wielding Occupy LA members on vandalism charges. Last month, the occupiers fought back during the city's popular Art Walk by staging their own Chalk Walk, decorating walls and sidewalks with slogans such as "Arrest corrupt bankers, not chalkers" and "When chalking is a crime, only criminals will play hopscotch."
Here's a taste:
After the Chalk Walk in Los Angeles. Jason Neville/Twitter
Things took an ugly turn around 8:40 p.m. when the first chalker was arrested, and occupiers began throwing bottles at the police; some 140 riot cops moved in to make arrests. Four officers and several protesters were injured.
Two weeks later, art teacher Alexander Schaefer, best known for his oil paintings of burning banks, decided to stage a chalk protest of his own. On the sidewalk outside of a Chase branch in downtown LA, he chalked the word "Crooks" next to a rendering of the Chase logo. Watch what happens:
Schaefer's arrest was the 15th arrest this summer on chalk-related charges in LA, although the City Attorney's Office has pressed charges in only a couple of instances. A spokesman for the office, Frank Mateljan, pointed me to a 2000 California Court of Appeals ruling that found that vandalism by graffiti "does not require an element of permanence." I asked if this meant that children could be arrested for making hopscotch courses. "The children in your scenario would not be committing a misdemeanor because they have no malicious intent," Mateljan replied. "Therefore, they would not be arrested."
Schaefer's attorney, Tom Tosdal, argues that it's no more reasonable to arrest political chalkers. "In California, vandalism is maliciously defacing a property," he says, "and when you express a political or social idea, it's not malicious."
Occupy LA declared last Thursday Chalkupy The World Day, giving rise to chalk art protests in a dozen locations including New York, New Orleans, and Austin, where two people were arrested and two children reportedly burst into tears as their mom confronted the police.
A duck and a
In cases where chalking arrests have gone to court, however, some judges have sided with the chalkers. In 1992, Christopher Mackinney was arrested in Berkeley, Calif.,* for using chalk to write: "A police state is more expensive than a welfare state—we guarantee it!" He sued the department for false arrest, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that his case could move forward because no reasonable officer could have assumed that Mackinney violated the state's vandalism law.
More recently, in Florida, Occupy Orlando protester Timothy Osmar, who spent 18 days in jail for chalking, won a free speech case against the city and received $6,000 in damages. The case ended up costing the city $190,000 in legal fees—validation, perhaps, for Mackinney's claim that maintaining a police state can be rather expensive.
Thursday, August 11, 2016
Oh No! More Free Speech at the Marinwood Free Speech Corner!
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| Can Marinwood handle Free Speech? |
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| Clearly this artist didn't spell revolutionary correctly |
NextDoor Marinwood Mayhem Part 2. "The Marinwood Free Speech Corner"
from Lucas Valley/Marinwood
You can be sure your friendly neighborhood blogger is never going to chill out. As we speak this thread is being copied onto a public blog, in direct violation of a NextDoor Privacy policy. More … View more
from Lucas Valley/Marinwood
Could we p l e a s e bring this topic to a close already. I mean getting literally dozens of emails is overkill. Thank you Leigh for waking all of us up to the need for these improvements. We all need to realize the world doesn't revolve around any of us
from Lucas Valley/Marinwood
Hi Leigh. I met you & your darling daughter in the shoe department of Macy's. I lost contact with you. I'd love to reconnect. Kate Wilson, Lucas Valley
from Lucas Valley/Marinwood
Someone washed the chalk off and wrote "censorship at its finest" if nothing else my kids and I had a good long talk around this subject. I was expelled from Terra Linda High for using chalk on the quad. Actually. It was a Necco valentines Heart candy. . . But I was using it like chalk. It changed my life for the better. So I never protested it. Nor did I realize at that time that I could (1998).
Chalk washes away. But what you write with it. Doesn't necessarily do the same.
Chalk washes away. But what you write with it. Doesn't necessarily do the same.
from Lucas Valley/Marinwood
I like the candy idea...
Maybe people should just draw art, instead of writing dumb sayings and making it about themselves. Somehow this went from a conversation about whether it's ok to insult the construction workers to being about censorship? Oh wait, I know how that happens. A blogger with no moral fabric.
Editor's Note: It appears that the "Lords of Intolerance" have struck back and petitioned Nextdoor to remove me permanently from receiving the newsfeed. It was bad enough this Spring,when NextDoor neighborhood Troll, Paul Brunnell wrote thirty posts attacking me in 48 hours after I had the timerity to suggest that the dog leash law should be overturned. The "Guardian of Public Decency" Bruce Anderson, neighborhood lead, disabled my account because I responded to Paul by calling him an "insufferable boar". Paul, the pillock, has been trolling me privately, online and verbally ever since so I am sure he will be thrilled to know he scored a "victory". Of course, there are others who will be thrilled to know too. For the rest of us, who behave like civil adults, I can assure you that free speech is not dead.
Savemarinwood.org will continue to be the "Most Dangerous Blog in Lucas Valley".
Where Sidewalk Chalk Laws Clash With Free Speech
Where Sidewalk Chalk Laws Clash With Free Speech
A federal court has ruled that a Las Vegas ban on street chalking can’t be enforced selectively. Across the country, there’s more at stake than hopscotch.
Up until two weeks ago, you could verbally lambaste police from the sidewalks of Las Vegas, but you couldn’t write those same words down in chalk on those same sidewalks without the possibility of getting arrested. That’s what happened to Brian Ballentine and Kelly Patterson in August 2013, when Las Vegas police charged them with vandalism for chalking critical messages about law enforcement on the sidewalk in front of a police station. The two are members of an Occupy offshoot called the Sunset Activist Collective, and had been chalking messages about police misconduct around Las Vegas since 2011.
Two weeks ago, a federal trial court judge ruled partially in Ballentine’s and Patterson’s favor, agreeing with the activists that Nevada’s anti-vandalism law is unconstitutional—if it’s only applied when the city or state doesn’t like what’s scribbled. The activists’ lawyers argued that Vegas police have no problem allowing chalked words on sidewalks by playful kids. Or when the content doesn't criticize cops.
Chalked messages have the shelf-life of a Snapchat. They can be washed away at little cost to anyone. But if police are enforcing the law selectively, that’s a problem.First Amendment-rights professor Eugene Volokh wrote in his Washington Postblog Monday that the federal court decision struck him as “quite right.” Three years ago, Volokh had a slightly different opinion: In July 2012, Occupy activists were arrested in Los Angeles after a scuffle with police that was reportedly over a city crackdown on sidewalk-chalk protests. Volokh told a local radio station that the city was in the right, under California law, to do this.
"California law says that any person who maliciously, with respect to any real or personal property not his or her own, defaces it with inscribed material, is guilty of a crime," Volokh told the station—though he did allow that the selective enforcement probably happens because police “never get called with regard to somebody playing hopscotch on the sidewalk."
Unfortunately, that’s not true. Mother Jones created this map in 2012 of all thecities where chalk arrests have occurred; one in Richmond, Virginia, involved the arrest of a mother after her 4-year-old was found drawing images in chalk on rocks in a local park.
Some courts have protected street-chalking bans even in cases where free speech was at issue: In the nation’s capital, a D.C. Court of Appeals determined that local police were correct to enforce a ban on a 2008 “chalk demonstration” that activists wanted to hold in protest of President Obama’s position on abortion. They wanted to chalk those frustrations down on the sidewalk in front of the White House, but the police confiscated their materials. So the protestors sued the city. The D.C. appeals court rejected their claim, though, stating that the city’s defacement statute holds zero tolerance for any kind of graffiti—especially not at the White House, which has a substantial “interest in controlling the aesthetic appearance of the street in front of” it. Reads the defacement law:
It shall be unlawful for any person or persons willfully and wantonly to disfigure, cut, chip, or cover, rub with, or otherwise place filth or excrement of any kind; to write, mark, or print obscene or indecent figures representing obscene or objects upon; to write, mark, draw, or paint, without the consent of the owner or proprietor thereof, or, in the case of public property, of the person having charge, custody, or control thereof, any word, sign, or figure upon: Any property, public or private, building, statue, monument, office, public passenger vehicle, mass transit equipment or facility, dwelling or structure of any kind… .
Whoever wrote the statute must never have seen what police horses leave behind on government streets and sidewalks, especially during protests. Indeed, Volokh points, in his May 11 blog, to an article from Hamline University law professor Marie Failinger that calls the government’s aesthetic rights defense basically a bunch of horse shit.
“[I]t is difficult to imagine a worse place to make an argument for aesthetic harm than a public sidewalk,” writes Failinger. “[T]he sidewalk is quite literally ‘beneath notice’: people walk on it and may not even notice a chalk drawing, unless it is a large or arresting installation.”
During a time when demonstrations against police have turned violent, as happened recently in Ferguson and Baltimore, governments would seem to have a compelling interest in supporting sidewalk-chalk protests. After all, it’s in large part due to residents being stripped of their voices in so many other ways that riots become a means of being heard.Venezuela Reaches the End of the Road to Serfdom
A lefty correspondent who believes that I have been unfair to Senator Bernie Sanders — specifically, that I have given insufficient attention to the “democratic” part of his so-called democratic socialism — writes: “You should write about those millions of souls trapped in the Canadian, Icelandic, Danish, and other democratic-socialist gulags.”
But, of course, there are no Canadian and Danish gulags. Then again, Canada and Denmark are not socialist countries. This is a truth the Left, and some of the Right, insists on refusing to learn.Canada in most meaningful ways enjoys a more free-market economy than does the United States, which is why our friends at the Heritage Foundation rank it several steps higher on their economic-liberty index. Denmark has a very free-market economy, too, though it is ranked one step behind the United States; Iceland is ranked ahead of Japan and enjoys a dramatically more free economy than is the Western European norm, ranked at No. 20 as opposed to No. 75 France and No. 86 Italy.
The reasons for these disparities are pretty obvious: The Nordic countries have relatively high taxes and big welfare states, but they also have free trade, relatively liberal regulatory regimes, transparent and effective public institutions, etc. The United States gets dinged for crony capitalism and overly complex regulation. As Nima Sanandaji points out in these pages, four of the five Nordic countries have center-right governments, with the social democrats holding power only in Sweden. But even Sweden has undergone decades of reform in what would be understood in the United States as a generally conservative direction, as indeed did Canada a few decades ago.
Welfare states are welfare states and socialism is socialism, and, in spite of the Bernie Sanders gang and the Right’s talk-radio ranters, they are not the same thing. Welfare states use taxes and transfer payments to enable higher levels of consumption among certain groups, usually vulnerable ones: the poor, the sick, the elderly, children. Welfare states are not synonymous with big government: Singapore, for example, offers surprisingly generous housing and health-care benefits despite having a public sector that is (as measured by spending) about half the size of our own and a little more than a third the size of France’s. Switzerland has a fairly typical portfolio of welfare benefits (including a health-care system that is approximately what Obamacare was intended to look like, if Obamacare hadn’t been written and enacted by fools) with a public sector that is smaller than our own. You can view the data and make your own comparisons here.
RELATED: In Venezuela, Socialism Is Killing Venezuelans
Socialism, as I have written at some length, is a different beast entirely. Like the welfare state, it involves the public provision of non-public goods, but it achieves this in a different way. Rather than levying taxes and distributing checks or vouchers, the socialist government owns and operates the means of production, or, in the corporatist variant, puts the means of production under political discipline effectively indistinguishable from government ownership of them. The easiest example to illustrate the difference here is in American education: The Right advocates a welfare-state approach, with government funding education costs through taxes which are passed on to families with school-age children in the form of vouchers, which can be used at a variety of different kinds of institutions serving a variety of different kinds of needs; the Left, in contrast, advocates the truly socialist model, with government owning and operating the relevant economic assets (public schools) which function as a monopoly. The fact that you can send your children elsewhere does not make them less of a monopoly: Stop paying your school taxes and they’ll still send men with guns to your house to force the money out of you, to seize your home, or to cage you until you comply.
Violence is always at the end of the socialist enterprise, as the poor people of Venezuela are discovering. Our friends on the Left assured us for many years that Boss Hugo and his epigones in the regime of Nicolás Maduro were democratic socialists, not the mean Stalinist type, and the praises of that so-called democratic-socialist regime were sung by everyone from Democratic congressmen such as Chaka Fattah of Philadelphia to progressive celebrities such as Sean Penn.
The democratic socialists in Venezuela have just introduced slavery into their workers’ paradise.
The Chávistas, like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald Trump, believe that international trade isn’t the open and mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services between people operating in open international markets but a nefarious scheme in which domestic workers are exploited and ripped off by ruthless foreigners who want to . . . sell them useful and desirable goods at low prices. (Never mind that for the moment.) Like the “Buy American!” gang here and the juche-practicing Norks, the Chávistas advocate a form of autarky, a system under which a country produces what it needs and consumes what it produces with minimal international trade, under the theory that such international trade impoverishes people. (They have never heard of Singapore, Hong Kong, or the United Kingdom, apparently.) So the Chávez and Maduro regimes enacted various kinds of controls on foodstuffs and other essential goods that sought to control prices and restrict international trade. Soon, the shelves of the grocery stores were empty, and Venezuelans couldn’t even buy a roll of toilet paper.
The food shortage is especially severe right now, so the Maduro government has just passed a decree empowering itself to conscript workers — public-sector or private — into the state’s collectively run farming, food-processing, and food-distribution businesses. The pattern here will be familiar to those familiar with the history of socialism in Russia and China.
RELATED: The Facts about Venezuela
Faced with the obvious evidence, Jesse Singal of The New Yorker performs a whole Beethoven sonata of whistling past the graveyard: “It would be a bit of an oversimplification to blame the catastrophe only on socialism qua socialism. Rather . . . it’s Maduro’s particular brand of socialism, which fuses bad economic ideas with a distinctive brand of strongman bullying, and which was handed down to him by Venezuela’s deceased former president Hugo Chávez, that is largely to blame.”
That’s right: It’s not the socialism, it’s just that socialism has never been done right.
Weird thing: That feckless and authoritarian kind of socialism is the only kind of socialism anybody has ever seen or heard of outside of a college dorm room. Either socialism is the unluckiest political idea in the history of political ideas and it just happens to have coincided with government by monsters, caudillos, and incompetents every place it has been tried, or there is in fact something wrong with socialism qua socialism.
Why is it that the big-government Danish welfare state, the small-government Swiss welfare state, the frequently illiberal Singaporean welfare state, and the nice-guy Canadian welfare state all seem to work, each in its own way, while socialist experiments — including the so-called democratic-socialist experiments of places such as Venezuela — go speeding down F. A. Hayek’s road to serfdom?
The critical difference is that entrepreneurship and markets are allowed to work in a welfare state — and to work especially well in welfare states characterized by public sectors that, while they may be larger or smaller, are transparent, honest, and effective. The U.S. food-stamp program has its defects, to be sure, but it’s a great deal more effective than was Soviet collective farming and state-run groceries. A dynamic capitalist economy such as Switzerland’s or Singapore’s or Canada’s can carry a lot of welfare state.
But it cannot really carry all that much socialism. The great American socialist experiment — the government school monopoly — is a shocking failure. The government’s attempt to operate a socialist pension system is collapsing and will never pay out its promised benefits at their real present value. For years, American farming was hobbled by federal attempts to manage agricultural markets, with tons and tons of so-called surplus grain left to rot in the name of rational economic planning, converting a period of agricultural abundance that would have merited its own religious myth if it had happened 4,000 years ago into a national economic catastrophe.
When one of our so-called progressives looks at a Nordic welfare state, what he always says he wants to replicate here is the relatively high taxes and relatively large public sector. It’s never Sweden’s free-trade policies, Denmark’s corporate-tax rate (which is far lower than our own), or Finland’s choice- and accountability-driven education system. When the American Left expresses its envy of Western Europe, it’s never Switzerland’s minimum wage ($0.00) it wants to reproduce, only bigger and more rapacious government. But the relatively large Danish public sector does different things than does the U.S. public sector, and it does them differently. A larger U.S. public sector would be a great deal like the current U.S. public sector — ineffective, captive to politics, corrupt — but bigger.
If you want to see what so-called democratic socialism looks like, turn your eyes south to Venezuela and its new slave-labor camps. What’s happening in Canada and Denmark is something else — something that is much more in tune with the approach and priorities of the free-market/free-trade Right, or at least what’s left of it.
— Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.
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Ray Decker from Lucas Valley/Marinwood19h ago