Things are not fine in Detroit City

...

Now homefolks think I'm big in Detroit City
From the letters that I write they think I'm fine
But by day I make the cars and at night I make the bars
If only they could read between the lines
I wanna go home I wanna go home oh Lord I wanna go home

....

Ferlin Husky's Detroit City

Washington Times:

When Charley Ballard tells the story of Detroit's myriad woes, he starts with 8 Mile Road.

The street, located eight miles from the city center, came to worldwide fame through a namesake feature film starring rapper Eminem, a local artist whose music offered biting social commentary about his life navigating between Detroit's white and black cultures.

Mr. Ballard, a Michigan State University economist, sees the thoroughfare as a clear racial dividing line of the city's population — and as an asphalt prologue to the long and twisted tale of how once-proud Motown became a mess of a town over the past few decades.

"You can't talk about Detroit without talking about race," Mr. Ballard says.

Mr. Ballard is a numbers guy who researches tax structures, but he says the figures that chart the fiscal downturn of the city don't tell the full story. It is, he says, the very human elements of the city that have dragged Detroit deeper into despair.

Immediately south of 8 Mile, Mr. Ballard says, the population is 80 percent nonwhite; north of the line, it's about 20 percent nonwhite.

In the 1970s, when Coleman Young, the city's first black mayor, took office in the wake of civil rights strife, many whites fled to the suburbs, polarizing the area and seeding bitterness that remains palpable to this day.

...

Now, says Mr. Ballard, "one of the unfortunate outgrowths of decades of racial tension is the tendency of parts of the African-American community to circle the wagons."

As many longtime Detroiters fled the crime and grit for an easier and cheaper life away from downtown, the city slowly became a fortress of malfeasance and poverty.

Now Detroit sits on the verge of bankruptcy, beset by political scandal, a declining population, troubled industry, high crime and unemployment rates and one of the worst school systems in the country.

...

There is much more.

I have a friend who used to live in Detroit. When the US started the bombing of Baghdad in the first Gulf War he compared it favorably to downtown Detroit.

Steve Chapman writes about Detroit as the prodigal son where the car makers with the worst performance are set to get the most from the government. That is possible, but they are also getting strings attached that can kill what is left of them. I think the smart money is on those who avoid the Washington control freaks who are the ones that really want them to build cars people don't want.

I think there has been only one car that was successfully designed by a government. That was the Volkswagen and the government was Nazi Germany home of the ultimate control freak government. While the Obama administration has certainly flashed elements of liberal fascism I don't think there car committee is any better than the guys in Detroit.

The fact is that the economies of scale in the car business require a certain number of sales to produce profits and in this recession there are very few car makers that have the volume needed.

But, besides the automakers, there is something else important to learn from Detroit and Michigan. Liberalism does not heal a bad economy, but it can make it much worse. We are seeing that now in California too which is being compared to France it is so bad. Yet Obama and the Democrats want to imitate the failed polices of states that are not working.