Statism is turning America into Detroit – Ayn Rand’s Starnesville come to life, by: Daniel Hannan

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Detroit Suburb from Air
Detroit Suburb from Air

Statism is turning America into Detroit – Ayn Rand’s Starnesville come to life

By Daniel Hannan

You thought Atlas Shrugged was fiction?

Look at this description of Detroit from today’s Observer:

What isn’t dumped is stolen. Factories and homes have largely been stripped of anything of value, so thieves now target cars’ catalytic converters. Illiteracy runs at around 47%; half the adults in some areas are unemployed. In many neighbourhoods, the only sign of activity is a slow trudge to the liquor store.

Now have a look at the uncannily prophetic description of Starnesville, a Mid-Western town in Ayn Rand’s dystopian novel, Atlas Shrugged. Starnesville had been home to the great Twentieth Century Motor Company, but declined as a result of socialism:

A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town. Everything that could move, had moved away; but some human beings had remained. The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes left in gutted cellars. It looked as if blind hands had seized whatever fitted the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next morning. The inhabited houses were scattered at random among the ruins; the smoke of their chimneys was the only movement visible in town. A shell of concrete, which had been a schoolhouse, stood on the outskirts; it looked like a skull, with the empty sockets of glassless windows, with a few strands of hair still clinging to it, in the shape of broken wires.

Beyond the town, on a distant hill, stood the factory of the Twentieth Century Motor Company. Its walls, roof lines and smokestacks looked trim, impregnable like a fortress. It would have seemed intact but for a silver water tank: the water tank was tipped sidewise.

They saw no trace of a road to the factory in the tangled miles of trees and hillsides. They drove to the door of the first house in sight that showed a feeble signal of rising smoke. The door was open. An old woman came shuffling out at the sound of the motor. She was bent and swollen, barefooted, dressed in a garment of flour sacking. She looked at the car without astonishment, without curiosity; it was the blank stare of a being who had lost the capacity to feel anything but exhaustion.

“Can you tell me the way to the factory?” asked Rearden.

The woman did not answer at once; she looked as if she would be unable to speak English. “What factory?” she asked.

Rearden pointed. “That one.”

“It’s closed.”

Now here’s the really extraordinary thing. When Ayn Rand published those words in 1957, Detroit was, on most measures, the city with the highest per capita GDP in the United States.

The real-life Starnesville, like the fictional one, decayed slowly, then collapsed quickly. I spent a couple of weeks in Detroit in 1991. The city was still functioning more or less normally, but the early signs of decomposition were visible. The man I was staying withn, a cousin of my British travelling companion, ran a bar and restaurant. He seemed to my teenage eyes to be the embodiment of the American dream: he had never been to college, but got on briskly and uncomplainingly with building a successful enterprise. Still, he was worried. He was, he told me, one of a shrinking number of taxpayers sustaining more and more dependents. Maybe now, he felt, was the time to sell up, while business was still good.

He wasn’t alone. The population of Motown has fallen from two million to 700,000, and once prosperous neighbourhoods have become derelict. Seventy six thousand homes have been abandoned; estate agents are unable to shift three-bedroom houses for a dollar.

The Observer, naturally, quotes a native complaining that ‘capitalism has failed us,’ but capitalism is the one thing the place desperately needs. Detroit has been under Leftist administrations for half a century. It has spent too much and borrowed too much, driving away business and becoming a tool of the government unions.

Of Detroit’s $11 billion debt, $9 billion is accounted for by public sector salaries and pensions. Under the mountain of accumulated obligations, the money going into, say, the emergency services is not providing services but pensions. Result? It takes the police an hour to respond to a 911 call and two thirds of ambulances can’t be driven. This is a failure, not of the private sector, but of the state. And, even now, the state is fighting to look after its clients: a court struck down the bankruptcy application on grounds that ‘will lessen the pension benefits of public employees’.

Which brings us to the scariest thing of all. Detroit could all too easily be a forerunner for the rest of the United States. As Mark Steyn puts it in the National Review:

Like Detroit, America has unfunded liabilities, to the tune of $220 trillion, according to the economist Laurence Kotlikoff. Like Detroit, it’s cosseting the government class and expanding the dependency class, to the point where its bipartisan “immigration reform” actively recruits 50–60 million low-skilled chain migrants. Like Detroit, America’s governing institutions are increasingly the corrupt enforcers of a one-party state — the IRS and Eric Holder’s amusingly misnamed Department of Justice being only the most obvious examples. Like Detroit, America is bifurcating into the class of “community organizers” and the unfortunate denizens of the communities so organized.

Oh dear. No wonder the president would rather talk about Trayvon Martin. If you want to see Obamanomics taken to its conclusion, look at Starnesville. And tremble.

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8 COMMENTS

  1. Daniel Hannan is one of the smartest English politicians that country has left. He’s right Rand’s vision has been prophetic, but it came to her from experience. She’d seen it already in the Soviet Union, which also collapsed in a heap due to reliance on government and distrust in free markets. It’s also no mere coincidence that our foreign policy has in the last ten years taken an alarming turn toward the tyrannical and desperate.

    It’s not just Evansville or Detroit we need to worry about, it’s the entire monetary system, the welfare/warfare state, the military industrial complex, the erosion of civil liberties over the last century that is finally beginning to corrode our underpinnings as a country. From my perspective, the best solution is a careful and controlled dissolution of the United States of America in favor of 50 smaller, more easily manageable countries who can then be free to form regional alliances for common currency, defense and trade. The alternative is an ugly collapse. In short, we should do as the Detroit bar owner in 1991 and get out while the gettin’s good.

    • Brad–
      Please get back on your medicine. This posting indicates you are about to loose it.

      • No, my post expresses an honest assessment of the situation with clean eyes, without any lip service to nationalism or blind patriotism. It might not be the most popular opinion, but it’s mine. Whether “the sky is falling” or not, I still think the United States has grown too large to be controlled rightly by an informed citizenry as it was in the days of the Founders’ 13 humble colonies and it’s time be begin honestly exploring ways to either reduce the size and scope of the federal government or begin working at our state levels to reassert our original authority and natural right to politely withdraw from the ratified agreement that entered us into the Statehood/federalist arrangement. Indiana, and every other State in the Union entered into existence via a due process of law and therefore can be dissolved via a due process.

  2. This “the sky is falling” crap doesn’t work on me. There are countries run by “pinkos” and “filthy red socialists” that are doing just fine.

  3. How many abandon houses do we have in Vanderburgh County? Why is Vanderburgh County facing a 2 million dollar shortfall?

    • Former head of DMD Tom Barnett said the City of Evansville has 10,000 houses that are not habitable.

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