Conservatives Forge Ahead With "Social Cleansing"

[Starglider]

As expected, no chance of an adult discussion when 'you disagree with me, you must be stooopid!' is considered a witty opening remark. You can assume that my remarks would be similar to the (overwhelmingly reasonable) user responses to this typical champagne socialist whining.

I will say though that the situation with SDN N&P is a microcosm of the geographic/income stratification issue, in that essentially there was an exodus productive and reasonable people because they didn't want to put up with all the bullshit. In both cases the situation will persist as long as the local authorities tolerate and indeed encourage antisocial behavior.

[Simon_Jester]

The first thing I'd ask, Starglider, is whether it's possible for income stratification to be a bad thing even if rich people are moving for logical reasons. I'd think so. "Bob did it for a reason" doesn't mean "One million Bobs doing the same thing won't cause problems, or make existing problems worse."

I'm not going to weigh in on the UK directly, because that's not the area where I can point to any serious studies of the problem. But looking at the US, there's a lot of evidence around for a pretty strong tie between the rise of "income/geographic stratification," the collapse of the urban manufacturing economy, racism, and state disinterest in doing anything significant about slums.

There was a major (state-subsidized) boom in the construction of road networks and single-family homes to support the suburban lifestyle after World War Two. At the same time, the inner-city poor population (mostly black, for racial-economic reasons) was still expanding, they had to go somewhere because the traditional lower-class ghettoes were already overcrowded. And yet there was constant resistance by middle-class citizens to having poorer people moving into their neighborhoods. Even middle-class blacks felt this way, for reasons I'm sure Starglider would embrace, but most of it came from whites and a lot of it came from race-based perceptions of "what they're like," the fear of having a mixed-race neighborhood (and what it would do to property values in an age of redlining).

So over time there was a very slow, systematic spread of the urban poor outward into new neighborhoods, while those able to afford single-family homes in the suburbs simply picked up and moved off, leaving a uniform city center packed full of people with low socioeconomic status. I'm sure most of them, except for the most flaming racists, had logical reasons for doing so, but the consequences for the cities were just horrendous, and have contributed to the rise of a permanent, multigenerational urban underclass.

I'd point people to Thomas Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis, where this is discussed at some length in a fairly accessible form. He's talking about Detroit; while Detroit is uniquely badly off, most of the problems Detroit has and had are ones other cities got too during the same era.



Anyway, that's in the US- and in the US, talking about "productive people move out because they don't want to put up with bullshit/crime/whatever" is a gross oversimplification. Nor is "statism" an adequate explanation over here, because to a large extent the problem isn't statism, it's how the state chooses to spend its money: funding white flight to the suburbs was simply a more palatable use of government money to 1950s and 1960s politicians than fixing the slums in a way that would keep them from becoming crime-riddled hellholes. It was much easier to tear down the slums to make room for 'urban renewal' and just assume that would make the poor people problem go away than to try to stimulate employment in those areas or anything like that.

Which is the problem with swinging the word "statism" around, in my opinion. There are so many things the state can choose to do, and so many voters calling on it to do them. Almost any policy elected leaders can adopt is one that someone will call "oppressive statism," if they're savvy enough to catch on and notice that state policy is affecting them.

Again, this is the US, not the UK, but I'd be surprised not to see similar factors in play. And I'm skeptical of the idea that the new underclass is simply the fruits of the nanny state, and is composed of people who'd straighten out their act if only the Conservatives were allowed to hit them with enough shock therapy and make them take personal responsibility for their own poverty.

Because the underclass doesn't go away when you remove the nanny state, or strip it down to the barest level consistent with not having actual violent mobs of poor people who will starve in the streets if someone isn't carting them piles of bread regularly.

[SirNitram]

As expected, no chance of an adult discussion when 'you disagree with me, you must be stooopid!' is considered a witty opening remark. You can assume that my remarks would be similar to the (overwhelmingly reasonable) user responses to this typical champagne socialist whining.

I will say though that the situation with SDN N&P is a microcosm of the geographic/income stratification issue, in that essentially there was an exodus productive and reasonable people because they didn't want to put up with all the bullshit. In both cases the situation will persist as long as the local authorities tolerate and indeed encourage antisocial behavior.

Wah, wah, wah. He flamed me! PR. 5.: Grow a Thick Skin. People are allowed to insult each other and use profanity on these forums. Do not run to a moderator or dismiss someone's argument just because he's insulting or rude. The best way to respond to a rude person is to show him up by producing a better argument than he can.

But instead, let's skip to dismissing someone for daring to call you a goddamn moron. When you evolve a spine and perhaps a real argument, come back, son.

[aieeegrunt]

Personally I'm a little butthurt about the "horrible Windsor fucking Ontario" remark . I grew up in Windsor and it's a great town; it has tons of awesome restaurants, the city government gradually bought up the whole waterfront (except Hiram Walkers) and turned it into a 17 km long park, there is a good mix of different cultures. It does go through periodic boom bust cycles because of the auto industry though.

No need for a moderator though.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I think you guys are debating on the proper cure for something that's already dead. The social stratification is a done deal in the english speaking countries, the horribly misnamed "elites" of society have isolated themselves from the productive working classes, have already lost all touch with what it actually means to be poor, and are indeed basing their decisions on caricatures of poor people calculated to make themselves feel awesome and justify their hoarding all the wealth to themselves. Meanwhile they think that the occasional horribly begrudged crumbs trickling from their table and lots of propaganda about bootstraps and you too can be rich if you just work enough unpaid overtime with no benefits will keep this situation stable in perpetuity.

History tells us that such a society is doomed to inevitable collapse; the actual wealth creating productive working class is increasingly oppressed, milked, overworked and bled dry so the wealthy parasites can be marginally wealthier. Grinding the productive working class to dust means less and less actual wealth is created, it also means there are fewer and fewer people with decent incomes that can actually afford to buy shit, the economy becomes increasingly based upon debt, smoke and mirrors and fanciful financial shenanigans, at some point the house of cards comes down. Leaving people with nothing means you leave them with nothing to lose; cue hatchet in rich asshole's skull time.

[madd0ct0r]

, the horribly misnamed "elites" of society have isolated themselves from the productive working classes,

that's the thing. London has always been unusual in having little rich and poor areas mixed very tightly. Literally crossing a street at a big cross roads you could see the difference.
(similar for liverpool, but the rich areas ain't so rich)

It's a dead issue in most of the west, but still an ongoing issue in london.

[Starglider]

The real problem with calling opponents 'morons' is not that you might hurt their feelings - particularly not in my case as my emotional investment in these arguments is negligible. Nor is it that you are belittling the very real struggle that people with genuine learning disabilities face - although in reality the use of 'moron' as an insult is just as bad as using 'gay' as a slur.

The reason why it is toxic to debate is that if you repeat any slogan constantly you will start to believe it, regardless of whether you tell yourself that it is a 'joke' or an 'exaggeration'. If you constantly call your opponents 'morons', you will start to believe that the only reason people disagree with you is lack of intelligence. Ignorance of facts is one thing, but if you don't credit opponents with even the ability to understand the position or have sensible reasoning for their own positions, you can't have a debate. You will just toss off some silly strawmen and assumptions (which you feel justified in doing due to your assumed greater intelligence) and leave it at that.

This is why I abandoned the SDN practice of calling everyone you don't like an idiot. I am just as capable as anyone else in sprinkling my posts with cookie-cutter insults, but after a couple of years of doing that I realised that it was damaging my own grasp of reality as well as torpedoing the debate in question.

Okay, this has gone far enough. Be snide and sarcastic about anyone whose politics you disagree with if you really must but you can stop putting words in my mouth right now

This is really very sad given that you are on a forum that is stacked in your favor in every way imaginable. You have a pack of socialists ready to mindlessly auto-dogpile anyone who makes you feel bad, then nuzzle your ear and whisper 'don't let that nasty conservative get to you'. In this very thread you were able to fantasise about putting an axe in the head of politicians you don't like, with nothing more than a 'psst, you're not supposed to say that out loud'. If someone from say HPCA came in here and talked about how Occupy Wall Street protestors should get an axe in the head, they would be banned from the forum inside of ten minutes. Finally you believe that...

Oh, and congratulations. You're the first person I've met who's even more embarrassingly ignorant about working class people than I was

...it's just fine for you to make sweeping assumptions about my background and life experience, but my mere acknowledgement of your tendency to threaten violent class warfare is hideous defamation. Of course you can rant about all of this without being accused of whining, because you are on the approved socialist list.

Wait, perhaps you'd prefer the SDN-approved response to your complaint;

Wah, wah, wah. He flamed me!

[Starglider]

The first thing I'd ask, Starglider, is whether it's possible for income stratification to be a bad thing even if rich people are moving for logical reasons.

Of course. Segregation of population by income is objectively a bad thing when the gain in quality of life for the people in the wealthy enclaves (adjusted for dimminishing marginal utility) is less than the drop in quality of life for the people in the poor enclaves.

"Bob did it for a reason" doesn't mean "One million Bobs doing the same thing won't cause problems, or make existing problems worse."

Negative social utility of an action that does not violate anyone's human rights implies a desire to disincentivise that action, it does not give you the authority to use state-sanctioned violence to try and stamp out the undesireables. As I said, an exodus of population from an area (wealthy or not) usually implies unpopular policies; people are simply voting with their feet. This is a very important backup to the electoral process in an age where party machinery so effectively limits the real impact of voting. You can and should try to entice people out of enclaves, you may even try to guilt-trip them if you wish. You may not force people to live where they don't want to live. That just gives you the ability to ignore the real problems, trample on individual rights and ultimately engage in the usual Stalinist 'for the greater good' attrocities. All western countries have income tax and substantial transfer payments between rich regions and poor regions, that should be more than adequate means for state attempts to improve the general welfare.

But looking at the US, there's a lot of evidence around for a pretty strong tie between the rise of "income/geographic stratification," the collapse of the urban manufacturing economy, racism, and state disinterest in doing anything significant about slums.

It's strange that you toss 'collapse of the manufacturing economy' in the middle there, because lack of economic opportunities is overwhelmingly the root cause of all the other issues. Racism is an independent root cause to some degree, but the majority of geographic stratification results directly from income disparity. Forcing people to live near to each other will not create jobs or errode stereotypes. You may get an uptick in charity due to people seeing the need more clearly, but it will probably be overwhelmed by the increase in crime and consequent hatred and demands for reprisals. You won't get any more taxes that you couldn't just have raised anyway with national-level taxation (assuming the wealthy migrants didn't renounce your citizenship altogether).

And yet there was constant resistance by middle-class citizens to having poorer people moving into their neighborhoods. Even middle-class blacks felt this way, for reasons I'm sure Starglider would embrace, but most of it came from whites and a lot of it came from race-based perceptions of "what they're like," the fear of
having a mixed-race neighborhood (and what it would do to property values in an age of redlining).

Obviously I am against any attempt by communities to prevent people from buying property (that they have worked hard to afford) or living there in peace and racially motivated attempts in particular. Yet any state attempt to break up supposed 'wealthy neighbourhoods' inevitably involves interfererence with the freedom to buy, sell and build houses.

I'm sure most of them, except for the most flaming racists, had logical reasons for doing so, but the consequences for the cities were just horrendous, and have contributed to the rise of a permanent, multigenerational urban underclass.

There are several policy issues here. Firstly, a major contributor is that the US insists on funding what should be universal services, particularly education, at the local level. There is reasonable disagreement about say the amount of money to spend building and maintaining public parks. Since we can only have one policy in a particular region, it is reasonable for city A to have high taxes and nice parks, and city B to have lower taxes and no parks, and for individuals to chose where to live based on whether they prefer green spaces or spending money. Conversely providing the next generation with a minimum standard of education required to fully participate in society is non-negotiable and should always be funded as long as the nation state itself is solvent (healthcare as well, but that's another issue). The UK arguably goes too far the other way in favor of centralisation, but in the case of funding vital services this is the lesser evil.

However funding is not the whole issue; even deprived US schools are well-funded by global standards, yet still have worse outcomes than schools in many vastly poorer countries. Poor quality of the home environment (parenting and community problems) leads to disadvantaged and disruptive students. Teachers who might otherwise enjoy the challenge of tackling these issues are put off by endemic violence and lack of class discipline. Liberal policymakers have removed all tools to maintain discipline from the teachers and they have largely removed mechanisms (e.g. streaming by subject ability) that would allow motivated students to get a decent education while sharing a school with disruptive students. To prevent total collapse the former child disiplinary mechanisms have been replaced by methods appropriate for adult criminals (e.g. metal detectors, strip searches, armed guards).

As such no I do not have a problem with parents moving to areas with good schools, even when the positive school environment is the product of an effective wealth filter, because (a) it was the only way for them to escape the negative consequences of liberal education policy and (b) bad parents do not have the right to wreck the education of other people's children regardless of personal circumstances.

He's talking about Detroit; while Detroit is uniquely badly off

AFAIK Detroit is the most union-dominated, i.e. actual socialist as opposed to just latte liberal city in the US. Unlike assorted conservative commentators I would not assume this to be the main cause of the decline - we seem to agree that deindustrialisation and racism are primary factors - but I assert that it is not a conincidence and why Detroit is the canonical rust belt basket case.

Anyway, that's in the US- and in the US, talking about "productive people move out because they don't want to put up with bullshit/crime/whatever" is a gross oversimplification.

Well sure, but that's true of any one-line summary of a social issue.

Nor is "statism" an adequate explanation over here, because to a large extent the problem isn't statism, it's how the state chooses to spend its money: funding white flight to the suburbs was simply a more palatable use of government money to 1950s and 1960s politicians than fixing the slums in a way that would keep them from becoming crime-riddled hellholes.

I am not familiar with the specific figures, but I find it hard to believe that 'funding white flight' can be presented as a minority taking funds from the majority to fund unreasonable largesse. The state's most contributing group of taxpayers demanded and got some of their taxes spent on transport infrastructure to meet their immediate need - though of course interstate development as massively useful to the economy in general, not just commuters. Inner cities constantly demand money for state-subsidised mass transport and they expect federal grants and transfer payments from out-of-city taxypayers. If you support this on utilitarian grounds it is hard to contest a group of taxpayers having some of their own money spent on transport connections to new (privately financed and constructed) housing.

It was much easier to tear down the slums to make room for 'urban renewal' and just assume that would make the poor people problem go away than to try to stimulate employment in those areas or anything like that.

Aside from the geuine health and safety risks of the poor standard of the existing housing stock, social theory of the time (even on the far left) supported the idea of improved architecture leading to improved socities. Of course this was classic social planning overreach coupled with the usual desire of politicians to be seen to taking bold action (and funnelling a few contracts to supporters), but I don't think anyone involved believed that the population of these areas would disappear.

Which is the problem with swinging the word "statism" around, in my opinion. There are so many things the state can choose to do, and so many voters calling on it to do them.

Oh come on. This board is replete with people ranting about the evils of 'capitalism' and 'libertarianism' is effectively a swear word; you are hardly in a position to complain about someone using an equally broad brush of a different colour.

Almost any policy elected leaders can adopt is one that someone will call "oppressive statism," if they're savvy enough to catch on and notice that state policy is affecting them.

There is a qualitative difference between coercive statism, e.g. imprisoning people, compulsory purchases of their homes, restricting movement between provinces, and incentivising desired behavior. It isn't a binary distinction - taxation is coercive but much less so than executing dissidents - but it is a very important one, as the consequences of abuse of coercive powers are so much graver.

I would personally say (and most libertarians would disagree) that there is also a qualitative difference between coercion of companies and coercion of individuals. Limited liability corporations are a legal construct that we have invented and permitt to exist because they're supposed to benefit the economy; it is reasonable to modify the rules as necessary to generate better outcomes. Individuals and individual rights were pre-existing and we should be far more reluctant to tamper with them. I am certainly not anti-coporation - the existence of corporations is a vital part of economic freedom in allowing meaningful group enterprise outside of the crushing beurecracy and endemic corruption of the state - but I favour modification of corporate governance structure and tax rules as a means of acheiving better outcomes.

And I'm skeptical of the idea that the new underclass is simply the fruits of the nanny state, and is composed of people who'd straighten out their act if only the Conservatives were allowed to hit them with enough shock therapy and make them take personal responsibility for their own poverty.

It is reasonable to complain about an excess of benefit scroungers if and only if there are plenty of vacancies and companies are having trouble finding staff. This was the case through say the late 90. When there is a lack of opportunity to escape unemployment, it is not reasonable.

That said, I'd note that the reason the cost of the welfare state is such an issue right now is that the US Democrats, UK Labour party and assorted socialist parties across Europe ran up such huge deficits in the 90s and mid-2000 booms, when they should have been taking advantage of the good times to paying down national debt.


Because the underclass doesn't go away when you remove the nanny state, or strip it down to the barest level consistent with not having actual violent mobs of poor people who will starve in the streets if someone isn't carting them piles of bread regularly.[/quote]

[Bakustra]

The UAW is not socialist and has never been majoritarian socialist and the leadership has been actively anti-socialist since the 1930s. Please don't talk out of your ass.

[Bakustra]

In any case, studies have confirmed that segregated communities like sundown towns and suburbs tend to be more intolerant- in addition to being more racist, they're more sexist, more anti-gay, and so on. What this means for gated communities and rich suburbs? Well, for one thing, they are generally already either sundown or recently de-sundowned, but for another thing, it means that the powerful are more intolerant than average. This is bad because the powerful dictate the structure of society. This is why Hollywood films reinforce racism and sexism and homophobia through stereotypes- because the people who make them, the producers and a large proportion of the writers, are alienated from society as a whole and so don't understand why these stereotypes are invalid and bad. This is why there are working poor who are effectively homeless- because the rich are too alienated from society to understand the consequences of their actions.

And the only way to rectify this is to treat them like puppies- rub their noses in it and reinforce that this is a bad thing. People may whine about economic freedom, but their economic freedom to buy a house wherever is causing pain and misery and death and actively making the world a worse place. Most people would agree that you do not have the freedom to actively harm somebody, so this is really in line with understandable restrictions on freedom. The chain of causality is a bit longer, but people die every day as a consequence of the rich wanting to pretend that the poor don't exist, and people don't usually die if they're punched, so why is the latter unacceptable and the former worth defending?

[Bakustra]

Of course, this doesn't mean, "Government dictates where you build your home", necessarily, but the point is that the segregation of rich and poor needs to stop, because it is actively damaging society, and I think that the exercise of state power is more palatable than anarchist revolution to most people, right?

[Simon_Jester]

Negative social utility of an action that does not violate anyone's human rights implies a desire to disincentivise that action, it does not give you the authority to use state-sanctioned violence to try and stamp out the undesireables. As I said, an exodus of population from an area (wealthy or not) usually implies unpopular policies; people are simply voting with their feet.

Although in many cases the policies aren't of state origin, or not of state origin alone. Again taking the example of the US, racism was a significant factor in triggering the original 'white flight' out of the city centers and into the suburbs. There was no state policy of forcing whites to move to the suburbs, or of forcing whites to live alongside blacks in the city centers. The blacks were themselves "voting with their feet" by moving out of the rural American south in search of manufacturing jobs and a slightly less flagrant degree of racism... but when they moved in, other people moved out rather than put up with their presence, without the state doing much of anything to make any of this happen.

This is not to say voting with the feet is illogical or immoral, but whether it's right or wrong it isn't necessarily caused by state policy.

Also, we often see the wealthy choosing to vote with their feet rather than pay taxes to fix a local problem. While this is understandable, if we as a civilization want to solve the problem, it leaves us in the less-than-happy position of having to tax Peter to pay for police and hospitals for Paul. Peter tends to complain about that... but I'm sure you can understand why I have limited sympathy for the complaint.

But looking at the US, there's a lot of evidence around for a pretty strong tie between the rise of "income/geographic stratification," the collapse of the urban manufacturing economy, racism, and state disinterest in doing anything significant about slums.

It's strange that you toss 'collapse of the manufacturing economy' in the middle there, because lack of economic opportunities is overwhelmingly the root cause of all the other issues. Racism is an independent root cause to some degree, but the majority of geographic stratification results directly from income disparity. Forcing people to live near to each other will not create jobs or errode stereotypes.

Put this way: compare majority black inner-city communities before and after segregation. The living conditions were generally poor and overcrowded, and blacks were being stuffed into the most dilapidated, obsolete, underserviced housing in the city... but successful black professionals lived alongside the working class and the chronically unemployed. This helped provide role models and leadership for the community as a whole: leadership can come from members of the lower class, but it definitely helps to have a leavening of people around with middle-class educations and professions.

When the black professionals moved out to the suburbs along with the whites, it in some ways weakened the inner-city community's ability to stick up for its own interest. There's a reason places like Harlem were more vibrant in the 1920s than they are now.

This has been discussed in the literature of urban history in the US, I am not making it up. I can dig up sources if need be, and the book I already mentioned, by Sugrue, talks about it a bit.

There are several policy issues here. Firstly, a major contributor is that the US insists on funding what should be universal services, particularly education, at the local level. There is reasonable disagreement about say the amount of money to spend building and maintaining public parks. Since we can only have one policy in a particular region, it is reasonable for city A to have high taxes and nice parks, and city B to have lower taxes and no parks, and for individuals to chose where to live based on whether they prefer green spaces or spending money. Conversely providing the next generation with a minimum standard of education required to fully participate in society is non-negotiable and should always be funded as long as the nation state itself is solvent (healthcare as well, but that's another issue). The UK arguably goes too far the other way in favor of centralisation, but in the case of funding vital services this is the lesser evil.

Agreed.

However funding is not the whole issue; even deprived US schools are well-funded by global standards, yet still have worse outcomes than schools in many vastly poorer countries. Poor quality of the home environment (parenting and community problems) leads to disadvantaged and disruptive students. Teachers who might otherwise enjoy the challenge of tackling these issues are put off by endemic violence and lack of class discipline. Liberal policymakers have removed all tools to maintain discipline from the teachers and they have largely removed mechanisms (e.g. streaming by subject ability) that would allow motivated students to get a decent education while sharing a school with disruptive students. To prevent total collapse the former child disiplinary mechanisms have been replaced by methods appropriate for adult criminals (e.g. metal detectors, strip searches, armed guards).

Quite a few of the American teachers themselves would disagree with this assessment- or at least the part where liberal policymakers have removed the mechanisms in question.

Just as the racial history of urban problems in the US doesn't map perfectly to Britain, the hooliganist history of urban problems in the UK doesn't map perfectly to America...

I would also note that "conservative" education policies in the US often have their own consequences. One of the poster children of this, "high stakes testing" usually translates into an endless effort to game the tests and oversimplify the curriculum to meet arbitrary goals set by the legislature. For instance, No Child Left Behind mandates annual increase in reading and math test scores for all students, with a goal of 100% "proficiency" in 2014. There are really only two ways to accomplish this. One is to expand math and reading instruction at the expense of things like science and history, which creates students who are at best good calculators but very ignorant in terms of general knowledge. The other is to dumb down the tests.

Schools who decline to do either will fail to meet their quotas and get broken up in favor of privatized charter schools; it is often a matter of luck whether the charter schools do a better job.

He's talking about Detroit; while Detroit is uniquely badly off

AFAIK Detroit is the most union-dominated, i.e. actual socialist as opposed to just latte liberal city in the US. Unlike assorted conservative commentators I would not assume this to be the main cause of the decline - we seem to agree that deindustrialisation and racism are primary factors - but I assert that it is not a conincidence and why Detroit is the canonical rust belt basket case.

I don't think you are correct in that. Socialism has not been a major force in American unions for quite a long time; the typical American union is no more avowedly socialist than, say, the British Medical Association.

Nor is "statism" an adequate explanation over here, because to a large extent the problem isn't statism, it's how the state chooses to spend its money: funding white flight to the suburbs was simply a more palatable use of government money to 1950s and 1960s politicians than fixing the slums in a way that would keep them from becoming crime-riddled hellholes.

I am not familiar with the specific figures, but I find it hard to believe that 'funding white flight' can be presented as a minority taking funds from the majority to fund unreasonable largesse. The state's most contributing group of taxpayers demanded and got some of their taxes spent on transport infrastructure to meet their immediate need - though of course interstate development as massively useful to the economy in general, not just commuters. Inner cities constantly demand money for state-subsidised mass transport and they expect federal grants and transfer payments from out-of-city taxypayers. If you support this on utilitarian grounds it is hard to contest a group of taxpayers having some of their own money spent on transport connections to new (privately financed and constructed) housing.

I don't contest it- my point is that the state was actively encouraging the middle class (which then included the upper end of "blue collar" as well as "white collar" labor) to spread out from the cities. These people voted with their ballots in a way which enabled them to vote with their feet. They did not vote with their feet as a protest against state policy, or certainly not any state policy we today would find unreasonable.

(In many cases this paid off- whites could get a federally subsidized home in the suburbs at a time when blacks weren't even allowed to buy, and as the values of those homes increased, the owners gained real wealth while the people in the city were still renting and gaining nothing, widening the socio-economic gap).

It was much easier to tear down the slums to make room for 'urban renewal' and just assume that would make the poor people problem go away than to try to stimulate employment in those areas or anything like that.

Aside from the geuine health and safety risks of the poor standard of the existing housing stock, social theory of the time (even on the far left) supported the idea of improved architecture leading to improved socities. Of course this was classic social planning overreach coupled with the usual desire of politicians to be seen to taking bold action (and funnelling a few contracts to supporters), but I don't think anyone involved believed that the population of these areas would disappear.

In many cases, there was no systematic attempt to build new housing or architecture. They just tore down the old stuff. New housing didn't get built until later, often after literally decades of begging from people who were tired of living one family to a room in what little quasi-affordable housing remained that would take them in.

Which is the problem with swinging the word "statism" around, in my opinion. There are so many things the state can choose to do, and so many voters calling on it to do them.

Oh come on. This board is replete with people ranting about the evils of 'capitalism' and 'libertarianism' is effectively a swear word; you are hardly in a position to complain about someone using an equally broad brush of a different colour.

I am not an official representative of SDN, and speak only for my own opinions. Please do not conflate me with, say, Bakustra. We are not the same.

There is a qualitative difference between coercive statism, e.g. imprisoning people, compulsory purchases of their homes, restricting movement between provinces, and incentivising desired behavior. It isn't a binary distinction - taxation is coercive but much less so than executing dissidents - but it is a very important one, as the consequences of abuse of coercive powers are so much graver.

In the US, almost any attempt to subsidize or incentivize anything gets labeled "statism." This is important to understanding why the US government is so utterly fucked despite minimal influence from what you would call the 'socialist' left- the Democrats are somewhere near the center by the standards of European politics.

It is very much possible to deadlock government by 'resisting statism;' the US is getting crushed by this problem and it probably creates a mismatch between you and the Americans on this forum. Maybe also between you and the reflexive anti-Americans, come to think of it.

It is reasonable to complain about an excess of benefit scroungers if and only if there are plenty of vacancies and companies are having trouble finding staff. This was the case through say the late 90. When there is a lack of opportunity to escape unemployment, it is not reasonable.

That said, I'd note that the reason the cost of the welfare state is such an issue right now is that the US Democrats, UK Labour party and assorted socialist parties across Europe ran up such huge deficits in the 90s and mid-2000 booms, when they should have been taking advantage of the good times to paying down national debt.

This is simply at odds with the facts, at least in the US. The Democrats did not control the budget-setting legislature in the US at any point between 1994 and 2006. There was a lot of deficit spending, but blaming the Democrats for it is deeply dishonest. The Republicans had considerable power over the budget in the 1990s, and yet the only reason it was even possible for the US to run a surplus in the late 1990s was because Clinton, unlike Bush, wasn't passing major tax cuts. As soon as the Republicans gained absolute power to balance the budget whenever they wanted in 2001, they passed rounds of tax cuts, started major land wars, and generally ran up the deficit to record-setting highs.

No one forced them to do that. And it would be a poor joke to accuse the American Republican Party of being socialist.

[SirNitram]

The real problem with calling opponents 'morons' is not that you might hurt their feelings - particularly not in my case as my emotional investment in these arguments is negligible. Nor is it that you are belittling the very real struggle that people with genuine learning disabilities face - although in reality the use of 'moron' as an insult is just as bad as using 'gay' as a slur.

Not really. Moron implies nothing but that you're an ignorant twit. Gay as an insult implies there's something wrong with being gay. I do love your complaint about 'genuine learning disabilities'; some sort of clumsy attempt to be subtle about mocking me for being an Aut?

Now. Are you going to evolve a spine, or whine about the fact this place has, you know, clearly posted rules about not whining like a stuck pig when flamed?

[aieeegrunt]

Of course, this doesn't mean, "Government dictates where you build your home", necessarily, but the point is that the segregation of rich and poor needs to stop, because it is actively damaging society, and I think that the exercise of state power is more palatable than anarchist revolution to most people, right?

The people who are in the position of being most able to dictate where state power gets exercised are also the ones who will want economic segragation to continue, since the rich political donors are hardly going to want to let those dirty working types move next door.

Expect the current trends in our society to continue accelerating till the whole thing collapses unless some combination of FDR and Lucius Cornelius Sulla somehow attains power.

[Zaune]

Remember this one? Well, it looks like it's going ahead.

The Guardian

Local authorities in London are preparing to send thousands of homeless families to live in temporary homes outside the capital, in defiance of ministerial demands that people should continue to be housed locally.

Councils are acquiring properties across Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Sussex, and further afield to cope with an expected surge in numbers of vulnerable families presenting as homeless as a result of welfare cuts from next April.

They say booming rents across the capital, coupled with the introduction next April of stringent benefit caps, leave them in an impossible position, with no option but to reluctantly kickstart an exodus of poorer families from the capital by placing homeless households in cheaper areas often many miles from their home borough.

Draft guidance issued by ministers in May says councils must "as far as is reasonably practicable" secure accommodation for homeless families within their own borough. This was ordered by the then housing minister Grant Shapps in the wake of reports that Newham council planned to relocate households to Stoke-on-Trent, a proposal Shapps, now Conservative party chairman, described as "unfair and wrong".

But Guardian research shows London councils have acquired rental properties in Luton, Northampton, Broxbourne, Gravesend, Dartford, Slough, Windsor, Margate, Hastings, Epping Forest, Thurrock, and Basildon, and are considering accommodation as far away as Manchester, Hull, Derby, Nottingham, Birmingham, and Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales.

Councils said the exodus of homeless families was inevitable because there is virtually no suitable private rented temporary accommodation for larger families in London that is affordable within government-imposed housing benefit allowances, which are capped at a maximum £400 a week.

"It is going to be practically impossible to provide affordable accommodation to meet our homelessness duties in London. As the pressures increase we will be looking to procure well out of London, and even out of the home counties," said Ken Jones, director of housing and strategy at Barking and Dagenham council in east London.

All but four of the 33 London boroughs responded to the Guardian survey. Seventeen said they are already placing homeless families outside the capital, or have secured or are considering temporary accommodation outside London for future use.

These included Kensington and Chelsea, which has already moved a minority of homeless families to Manchester and Slough; Waltham Forest, which has acquired housing in Luton, Margate and Harlow; Brent, which has relocated some households to Hastings; and Tower Hamlets which has relocated a handful of families to Northampton.

Hackney council, which said it currently manages to house 93% of families accepted as homeless within the borough, and the remainder elsewhere in the capital, said it was now "reluctantly looking to procure accommodation outside London".

Councils expect a wave of legal challenges from homeless residents who will cite government guidance to argue that their offer of accommodation outside the capital is "unsuitable" because of the negative impact it will have on their health, or their children's education, according to a new study published by the charity Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG).

The CPAG report warns that thousands of homeless families already placed in expensive temporary accommodation in the capital will now face being uprooted for a second time. Councils could face the choice of picking up the bill for the rent shortfall for these households – expected to run to tens of millions of pounds a year – or moving the families to cheaper homes outside the capital.

Alison Garnham, CPAG chief executive, said: "Families are facing the impossible situation of being told to move to cheaper accommodation that just doesn't exist with London's rising rents. London boroughs are staring at a black hole in their budgets as a result, with costs transferred from central to local government.

"There's still time for government to do the sensible thing and think again when these reforms are debated in parliament before thousands of London's families find themselves uprooted, overcrowded and thrown into turmoil."

MPs are expected to debate regulations which will set out the detail of how the benefit cap will work at a Commons legislation committee meeting on Tuesday.

Government guidance states: "Homeless households may not always be able to stay in their previous neighbourhoods. However the government considers that it is not acceptable for local authorities to make compulsory placements automatically hundreds of miles away, without having proper regard for the disruption this may cause to those households."

The CPAG report, based on detailed interviews with 11 London local authorities, also found many working households will also face substantial income shortfalls as a result of housing benefit caps. Councils report that families are reluctant to move if this would disrupt their childrens' schooling or cut them off from relatives and friends, triggering fears this could lead to a surge in overcrowding as families improvise by sharing properties or trading down to smaller flats.

Although it had been anticipated that affordable private rents in expensive inner city areas such as Westminster would be scarce, the acute housing shortage in the capital means market rents outstrip benefit cap levels in cheaper outer London boroughs including Haringey, Waltham Forest, and Barking and Dagenham.

Families have already begun to move from inner London to the capital's outer boroughs, with more expected from this month as transitional support for families affected by the housing benefit caps runs out. The government had hoped that the housing benefit reforms would force landlords to reduce rents to within cap limits.

But councils say the spiralling demand for private rented property from tenants priced out of the housing market means most landlords see no reason to drop rents, and a substantial number say they will no longer consider renting to people who are claiming housing benefit.

Some councils have estimated that up to a third of families affected by the introduction of the £26,000 benefit cap, the local housing allowance cap and under-occupation penalties, known as the "spare room tax", will lose around £100 a week. They face the option of finding work, moving into smaller and cheaper accommodation, or presenting to the local authority as homeless.

Most authorities have attempted to identify and advise residents at risk of losing income as a result of welfare changes. But there is acceptance among officials that many of the families affected will have few options.

One cabinet member for housing in an inner city borough said: "Let's face it, a lot of people with more than two or three children, and who are dependent on benefits in this borough are not going to be here for very much longer."

Although ministers have introduced a £165m discretionary housing fund for London councils in 2013-14 to help families who can make a special case for staying, the CPAG report estimates that this is inadequate and amounts to less than 10% of the shortfall in benefit income caused by benefit changes.

Councils say some of the households who will be hit by the benefit cap have also been identified by them as needing support under the "troubled families" scheme. But they fear a public backlash if they prioritise them for discretionary housing payments because this would send out a signal that "problematic behaviour was being rewarded".

A Government spokesperson said: "It is neither acceptable, fair nor necessary for local authorities to place families far away from their area. The law is already clear that local authorities must secure accommodation within their own borough so far as reasonably practicable, and new rules will reinforce this.

"Our reforms restore fairness to a system that was allowed to spiral out of control under the previous Government. It's not right that some families living on benefits should be able to live in areas of London that hard working families could simply never afford to stay in.

• Additional research by Irene Baque

Well, it could be worse. Kent and Essex? No big deal, they're practically part of Greater London anyway. Northampton or Birmingham? Well, not ideal from a right-to-family-life point of view but at least they've got a somewhat functional local economy, and it's not insurmountably expensive to get on the train and take the kids back to the smoke to see their grandparents once a month or so. But Stoke on bloody Trent! Someone on the BBC 4 scheduling committee must've got a tip-off, that's just too blackly hilarious to be a coincidence.

[K. A. Pital]

ITT we learn that Starglider does not know what blockbusting is and how it is easily performed by real estate agents in practice.

[Norseman]

Sometimes I really wonder whether "conservatives" aren't actually undercover communists who are doing their best to bring the revolution on. Reading this story was one of those moments.

Sometimes I've wondered if Comrade Alyssa Rosenbaum was secretly a communist agent too, it'd explain why her supposedly capitalist writings so marvellously mirrors the precepts of Socialist Realism.

[Norseman]

That said I'm standing here, marvelling at just how fast things are going south all across the board in Europe. Also I'm amazed at the willful blindness of a lot of politicians, they act as if they are not in any way answereable to the people. Or to be precise, I notice that a lot of political parties and politicians act as if they own their positions and their power, indeed as if they own the whole of society. I wonder if that sense of entitlement and ownership is really what lies behind it all.

I am also reminded by what happened during the late period of colonialism, where in some cases the colonial government would almost go out of their way to provoke the locals. This was done because there's this human tendency for people whose power and control are being threatened to provoke a response, which allows them to re-assert dominance. I wonder if a lot of what we see today is people on the losing side, or people who are about to lose power, but who are still important, wanting to assert that they are still in charge.