The Void of Progressive Logic

Oct. 28, 2017

The City of Traverse is about to elect new commissioners. There is scarce difference in the candidates’ problem-solving ideas. In a recent forum on traffic problems, the lot of them suggested we could reduce traffic in Traverse City by making traffic move slower through town and narrowing the pathways traffic follows. As far as I know, no one was publicly laughing at them.

It doesn’t take a genius to know that if you have too much water in your yard, you don’t get rid of it by narrowing its outlet. You might be able to restrict its flow, but if you do, it will never drain — you’ll just have a muddy puddle for eternity. We’ve seen this with the stop signs on S. Union and Cass streets at 10th and 12th streets. They were intended to ease traffic, but all they’ve done is ensure that traffic is always present on those roads and pushed it into the neighborhoods.

The problem in Traverse City is that too many people blindly adopted the theoretical solutions of the left — without ever asking if there is any logic behind those solutions, or if they have ever worked. The fantastical thinking grows more outrageous and divorced from reality every day.

The left believe that the Earth is warming. For the sake of this argument, let’s assume they are correct.* Their solution is to tax things they don’t like — e.g., You can burn all the energy you want, as long as you atone by paying a carbon tax to the government.

How exactly do higher taxes cool the earth cool?

Consider mass killings. Anyone who commits murder is breaking the law in almost every legal system, right down to the granddaddy of them all, the Ten Commandments. Yet the left’s answer to any news-grabbing murder is to pass more laws making something new illegal. More laws will not deter criminals and kooks who are already breaking the law. It’s childish to think they will. And yet, that is exactly the left’s go-to solution. Chicago has more gun laws than any other city this side of California; it also has the highest murder rate in the country.

Trace these illogical measures to the original class envy of Communism. One of the progressive sacraments is that people who make a lot of money should pay a higher percentage of taxes. While the poor might feel schadenfreude seeing the wealthy suffer, those higher taxes have never done anything to benefit people of modest income. Those high taxes have made the counties surrounding Washington D.C. the wealthiest in the country, but they have done nothing for the downtrodden in Traverse City. It sounds good, and it feels fair, but if the wealthy in Traverse City had those tax dollars, they would spend them here. Who is more likely to spend locally: people who live here, or people in Lansing or Washington D.C. who might drop by for a parade once a year? Local spending is good, right? 

Too many of the left’s policies are based on feeling, rather than positive quantifiable results. We have spent trillions in the war on poverty since the 1960s, and in those 50 years, with all that money wasted, the poverty rate is the same. The liberals feel better, but they have not changed anything. It feels virtuous talking about helping the poor, but the results of all this virtue signaling are the wastelands of Detroit and Baltimore. 

The roster of flawed thinking goes on and on. You will not get fewer incidents of terrorism if you allow terrorists to flow into our country. The left feel that their love and good-natured spirit will magically reform those who have evil as their guiding doctrine. It won’t. Love and compassion aren’t that strong, and they are terrible defensive weapons.

It was easy for the people of Traverse City to adopt the left’s failed policies, because in most cases, the negative consequences of those policies happened somewhere else. Detroit bore the burden of our good will. The distance is closing.

Benzie County has a heroin problem because the dealers move freely in T.C. It’s close to home now. Yet the commitment to flawed thinking is so engrained that Traverse Citians won’t give it up even when it hits home. We have seen our homeless population grow rapidly. We have a problem. However, the problem isn’t that we have too many people here losing their homes. We are importing homelessness because T.C. is a nice place to land if you are a vagrant. We see the young able-bodied drifters wandering all over town in the summer. They tarnish our city and use our resources. The community allows it.

The Eighth Street restriping is a proven disaster. We all have seen it push backups onto Woodmere Avenue and into Traverse City’s Central Neighborhood. Rather than Eighth Street getting better, everything that touches Eighth has gotten worse. There are ways to solve traffic problems, but the people of Traverse City do not want to hear them. Things like increasing flow around the city, or designating one main artery through town to flow freely and quickly would reduce traffic everywhere else. You won’t hear that solution from an Oregon think tank, so it won’t happen here.

We don't have leaders smart enough or courageous enough to try something beyond the approved handbook of liberal thinking. It’s too late for this election season because we have a full slate of “Me Too” politicians. I just hope logical thinking isn’t gone from T.C. for good.

* The left’s own experts have recently admitted they were wrong [again], and the signs are reversing: See recent data on polar ice.

Thomas Kachadurian is a photographer, designer, and author. He lives on Old Mission with his wife and two children. He is a member and past president of the Traverse Area District Library Board of Trustees.