re: #9 Interesting Times

I hear that last line, but I do not agree with it.

Moreover, I’d argue that the ‘Yankee’ areas of the Northeast had become weak in heart after World War II, no longer willing to do what was needed to maintain America’s independence against the Soviet threat. Indeed, there were a few such Yankees like Alger Hiss who were prepared to betray their country and burn America’s tradition of freedom to the ground. The northeast also stopped taking effective action to try to uplift the poor, and instituted a massive but poorly designed welfare expansion that ballooned both the government and the national debt while making the poverty that still existed worse by fostering the growth of illegitimacy. Lastly, but especially damningly, far too many northeastern elites turned against the idea of keeping order, thus condemning the poor and middle class (and sometimes even the rich) to suffer under an onslaught of crime. And when men like Rudy Guliani and William Bratton finally took effective action against that crime, people like Ms. Robinson attacked them and tyrants and fascists.

Sara Robinson would likely assign William Bratton’s methods of policing to the “brutal South”, but they reduced violence sharply in both New York City and Los Angeles and ultimately those policies lead to far fewer poor people being the victims of violence. In New York, they ultimately caused a massive fall in people being shot by the police and so worked to the benefit of even crime-prone.