Paris is burning and facing economic turmoil as young protesters and criminals have taken to the streets in violent temper tantrums.
The leaders of Paris sit back in a state of petrified paralysis and have forfeited control as civil protest has turned whole neighborhoods into zones of chaos and jungle warfare. It’s like a scene out of a Batman movie.
But voters in America’s great cities from coast to coast aren’t paying attention.
Los Angeles just became at least the fifth major American city to elect a socialist mayor. The incompetent Karen Bass — who couldn’t stop the mountain fires from torching thousands of homes — deserved to be ousted, but she won’t be replaced with a Rudy Giuliani-like, common-sense and tough-love reformer. No, LA voters apparently thought Bass wasn’t quite anti-business enough, so they elected Nithya Raman, the avowed socialist.
Washington, D.C., also just elected a socialist mayor, Janeese Lewis George, to run the nation’s capital. This is the city that wants to become a state.
These two mayors join the socialist ranks of New York’s Zohran Mamdani, Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, Seattle’s Katie Wilson and Providence, Rhode Island’s David Morales. Some are avowed socialists, others call themselves something else.
But the lesson of Europe’s urban economic collapse — Britain now has a per capita income lower than America’s poorest state, Mississippi — is that socialism and the green movement make people poorer and thus angrier. There’s a good reason Germans are furious. The green movement embraced by the democratic socialists in just one generation has sadly deindustrialized that nation. Ideas have consequences.
One major goal of the New Left is to soak the rich with ever-rising tax rates. It should be self-evident that this will only chase the wealth producers out — because it’s already happening at warp speed.
Seattle should be regarded as the canary in the coal mine. Wilson, who has never had a real job and has most of her life lived with her parents, has been in office for a year, and businesses have fled so rapidly that the city now has the highest office vacancy rate in the country. The city is now becoming known for “zombie towers” — near-empty skyrise buildings.
The Seattle jobs market — in what was once a high-tech mecca — has gone from boom to bust, and new job postings have collapsed. Iconic Seattle-based companies from Starbucks to Amazon are moving jobs and people out.
Why?
Seattle has become a socialist hellhole. The Democrats raised the state tax rate on high-income earners from zero to 9.9%, so many business owners have exited stage right. Crime is rampant. The minimum wage is now above $20 an hour, killing small businesses.
Some might say these cities are getting what their voters asked for. But America can’t thrive if our great cities — the symbols of America’s industrial and financial dominance — are melting down.
We don’t want our cities to experience the Euro-sclerosis that has led countries down the path of “burn down the village.”
It would help if moderate Democrats would sound the alarm. So far, they’ve been as quite a mouse — which makes them complicit.
Stephen Moore is a former Trump senior economic adviser and the cofounder of Unleash Prosperity, which advocates for education freedom for all children.
Photo credit: McCarthy Beckan at Unsplash