The Collapse of American Cities

 We can see the cities of America deteriorate.  We know that office buildings are empty and that soon the city won’t be collecting the taxes from that office building, they won’t be collecting the sales taxes from noon-time shoppers, the theft and open looting of retail stores will force them to close which will further exacerbate any reason for people to want to go the city.  Cities are now filled with “useless mouths” who don’t really do anything other than consume and vote while they contemplate what pronouns to use or decide what victim class they want to be a part of.  Those types of folks vote Democrat and now you can see why cities end up being run by Democrats who run them into the ground.  The saying below gives us one more reason to expect America to fall into hard times.  

“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”

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International Man: What made big American cities attractive places to live in the past?

Doug Casey: Well, it’s not just American cities; it’s cities in general. Throughout all of history, cities have equated with civilization.

Cities offer safety, comfort, wealth, and community. They’re a medium for people to exchange ideas and trade easily. The Ascent of Man is built on cities and wouldn’t have been possible without them. Civilization is all about specialization and division of labor. The larger the city, the freer the society, the greater the possibilities.

American cities have been among the best in history because America itself has offered more freedom and less government restrictions than anything in the past.

It’s no mystery why American cities should have been so great in the past, but things are changing. To destroy cities is to destroy civilization.

International Man: American cities have visibly deteriorated across all metrics in recent years.

For an increasing number of people, the value proposition of living in cities no longer makes sense.

What is your take?

Doug Casey: I presume everybody’s heard the mnemonic, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”

Unfortunately, American civilization has reached the stage where it’s getting soft, weak, and degraded.

I place the State—government—at the root of this collapse. It’s implemented welfare, which not only allows but encourages people to consume without producing. So-called “democracy” has created class warfare, wherein everyone tries to gain control of the government to gain wealth and power. It’s created an unstable society, inventories of people that have been correctly called “useless mouths.” They’re incapable of anything beyond consuming and voting.

Governmental policies have turned the cities into cesspools.

That little aphorism about weak men that we quoted earlier can be seen as a variation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics—one of the few laws that I believe in. It states that everything winds down over time unless there’s an adequate input of energy to keep things going. In other words, to stay healthy, they should produce more than they consume. But that’s no longer true. Many American cities are now net drains on the country.

The collapse that American cities are experiencing has been very quick from a historical point of view. You can lay part of it to the general degradation of society, which has been actively promoted by academia, the media, and the entertainment industry. Wokesterism, a philosophy of neo-Marxism, racism, and rabid collectivism, has totally captured governments everywhere. But especially in the cities, from which their corrupt and degraded ideas spread out to the general population.

International Man: What will happen to the already tight budgets of many cities as their most productive residents continue to leave in increasing numbers? What are the implications?

Doug Casey: Well, the degradation affecting American cities is actually nothing new. It’s happened across time and space throughout history. Babylon rose and fell and went back to dust. The Egyptian, Hittite, and Assyrian Empires all vanished. The golden age of Athens lasted less than 100 years. After Rome collapsed, cows and goats grazed in the forum during the following Dark Ages.

It doesn’t have to happen that way, but that’s the general trend of things. At this point, the American empire is collapsing, and its cities are leading the way.

https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-the-collapse-of-american-cities/