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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"How to do well by doing good"

9 Comments -

1 – 9 of 9
Anonymous Drawbacks said...

'Real-world political suggestions focus on "cool communities," reroofing and re-paving in lighter colors as well as planting trees. It is estimated that such a program for Los Angeles - involving planting 11 million trees, reroofing most of the 5 million homes, and painting a quarter of the roads - would have a one-time cost of $1 billion. However, it would have annual added benefits of lowering air-conditioning costs by about $170 million, and providing $360 million in smog-reduction benefits. Plus the added benefits of a greener LA. And perhaps most impressive, it would lower LA temperatures by about 3°C - or about the temperature increase envisioned for the rest of this century.'
-- Cool It, Bjorn Lomborg

Get writing those checks, stimulus bureaucrats!

2/5/09, 2:24 AM

Blogger neil craig said...

The asthma one is politically loaded too.

Here in the UK the BBC have officially announced that 17,000 children a year are hospitalised by passive smoking. This is, of course, a complete lie. What they have done is taken all the growing childhood asthma cases & said they must be from smoking. Even ignoring the total lack of positive evidence, this must be a lie because asthma is growing & smoking is declining (probably because childrenn nowadays are wrapped in cotton wool in their early years as the immune system develops). However only a nasty capitalistic person could question giving more power to government activists when it involves suffering children.

2/5/09, 6:06 AM

Anonymous David said...

Every goofy idea in the world wants funding. If goofballs can't get funding on the private market, they go to the government. The government raises the money by taxation or inflation, i.e. takes it from the private market.

The goofballs are thieves - they have a thief mentality.

2/5/09, 6:08 AM

Anonymous Reader said...

The "community organizer" shakedown artists are annoying but they're small potatoes compared to the big Wall Street financial parasites. Liberals are right on this one.

2/5/09, 6:22 AM

Anonymous Piper said...

I hadn't realized until now that the shakedown artists have made the word "gentrification" a pejorative term for "economic development," carrying the connotation of "evil."

Still, that excerpt does show what "community organizers" think of building up any community-- they're against it!

2/5/09, 6:40 AM

Anonymous testing99 said...

There are sound policy options that increase wealth. Liberals and non-White interest/lobby groups oppose them:

1. Policing, strict sentencing guidelines, imprisoning criminals, reducing street/violent crime.

This reduces the thug tax that the criminal element extorts out of poor people, increasing their wealth far more than junk loans.

2. Low taxes and regulatory barriers to entry for small business, helping create jobs.

3. Clean, efficient, non-corrupt government focused no doing a few things well: public safety, libraries/health, public education.

4. Discouraging single motherhood in culture and government -- making women choose long-term instead of short-term and creating the nuclear family instead of the single-parent nightmares.

2/5/09, 10:44 AM

Anonymous Piper said...

Think of self-contradictions which "community organizers" face. They (supposedly) want to make the neighborhood a nicer place to live (nicer homes, nicer local businesses, more local jobs, better schools...), BUT, they don't want the improved amenities to attract new residents with more money-- even though that's pretty much the definition of an improved neighborhood: one that attracts people who could afford to live elsewhere!

Every time someone voluntarily sells a house or moves out of an apartment, there is a chance that someone else more affluent will buy the house or rent the apartment. As any neighborhood becomes more attractive this sort of population turnover may occur, all in quite a voluntary manner-- the person who sells his house presumably values the buyer's money more than the house; and people who leave apartments generally move someplace else that suits them better.

If you're a community organizer, though, you must oppose such voluntary population turnover! You think: "the point of all my hard work is to see all the po'folks who lived here when I arrived (e.g., to Chicago from Harvard Law School) living in a swank neighborhood! I don't want them to sell out to gay bohemians or self-consciously "progressive" white people, take the capital gains created by all my community organizing, and move to some other slum!"

No wonder community organizers devote so much effort to forcing new "low income housing" set-asides and prolonging old ones. It takes coercion to keep slumdwellers in a swanky neighborhood-- and vice-versa. The logic of community organizing dictates the use of such coercion-- almost by definition, under conditions of economic freedom large numbers of poor people will not remain in an affluent neighborhood.

2/5/09, 11:46 AM

Anonymous David said...

Piper said

I hadn't realized until now that the shakedown artists have made the word "gentrification" a pejorative term for "economic development," carrying the connotation of "evil."

Oh, they were doing that at least 20-25 years ago in Manhattan, regarding e.g. the Lower East Side.

On this subject the lefties have, if not a point, then a point of purchase: multi-millionaires of dubious provenance (think oligarchs and govt. fat cats etc.) leveling lower-middle-class neighborhoods to put up multi-million-dollar condos unaffordable by 99% of the people there. NOT community-friendly. On the other hand, turning dangerous wasteland ghettos into safe, trendy, artsy neighborhoods IS an improvement. I believe lefties use animus against the former to support the latter, at best - and at worst oppose both and all.

2/5/09, 12:13 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Piper, your comment about "self-contradictions" really nails it. You describe the anxieties, not only of the shake-down artists, but also of people who live in neighborhoods like mine, i.e., the Norwood section of The Bronx, predominantly Hispanic, lower middle-class to poor. We are lucky to have the stabilizing influence of the Montefiore Medical Center, which almost envelopes this area, with its buildings interspersed everywhere. The Center is a very responsible, conscientious landlord and neighbor, and many people in the area work there.

We have small stores galore, six bank branches (which is always a healthy sign), and lots of "progressive" community stuff. There's always the construction of something or other (like a filtering plant) that's being fought against. That's when the white folks appear.

We're used to renovations and new edifices being constructed only by Montefiore. So, when a commercial builder takes over an old car lot and begins construction, there is an "Uh, oh, what might this mean?" kind of anxiety. This fear also comes about when some upscale store attempts a branch in the area, which always, always fails. ( One wonders, who in the world does their marketing research.)

At any rate, such attempted innovations will set off visions of freshly scrubbed 20-somethings flying in from Ohio and Indiana, to take cheap apartments in The Bronx, while commuting on the D or #4 train to their fancy Manhattan jobs. The beginnings of gentrification!
-- Victoria

2/5/09, 1:45 PM

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