250 years of continuously extinguishing the bottom ~2% of men who could not behave produced the modern Englishman and Anglo-American , who from the early 1700s to early 2000s almost entirely created the modern world.
For many decades, Venezuela was richer than Poland. But then Poland adopted capitalism and flourished, while Venezuela opted for socialism and crumbled.
https://t.co/LvbzvJHH4A
The fatal flaw of democracy is that the underclass is always more numerous than the upper class, and their votes count the same.
In practice, this means that you can make life worse for productive, law-abiding residents and still get elected. In fact, it’s best if you do. It works especially well with low-trust, zero-sum thinking people, now an ever-greater share of the electorate.
Of course, at some point the city will become a dump and people will leave; it has already started. But there’s now a magic trick called mass immigration, where you can bring in millions of new voters to prop you up. Just make sure your city is marginally better than the third-world country they fled, and you’re golden.
There’s not much point in trying to blame specific individuals. The thirdworldification of cities is simply baked into the incentive structure of democracy × unselective immigration.
LA, NYC — same story
Lee Kuan Yew: "Hay que tener la disciplina que tienen los suizos. Nunca tengan déficits fiscales. En otras palabras, no pongan a funcionar la máquinita. Si tienen un déficit, pidan prestado, paguen. Nunca impriman billetes sin respaldo".