4 ms·

If I were the king, I would fix Camden (and dozens of other grim urban districts around the country such as Detroit, north St. Louis, etc.) with the following p

If I were the king, I would fix Camden (and dozens of other grim urban districts around the country such as Detroit, north St. Louis, etc.) with the following plan: 1. Legalize drugs. Allow local municipalities to regulate and tax recreational substances. Boom. You have an instant local revenue stream, the police are suddenly out of the business of arresting people for "possession", and can focus more on violent crime, domestic disturbances, etc. In the short term, drug-funded gangs will turn to theft and robbery to stay in business, but anyway a major, relatively safe and easy source of revenue will be gone. 2. Declare certain urban areas to be economic development zones with drastically reduced taxes and regulations. Make it dirt cheap to locate factories and plants there. Provide start-up grants to local entrepreneurs, with real oversight, not just feel-good handouts. Lower the barriers to business start-ups and there will be business activity, and it will accelerate as the cycle of crime and poverty is reduced. 3. Fix the K-12 schools. Double the teachers' pay, double the security around the schools and provide secure bus rides to and from the projects and tenements. Make the school day longer, and ratchet up the standards. Demand higher achievement, and don't let a kid just flunk and walk away; make them re-take, make them realize the importance. Make school a destination, not a chore. Teach democracy in the schools. Emphasize basic literacy skills, ethics and morality, history, how to speak and write properly, mathematics and science. Make the schools the best in the state in terms of standards. These are all easier said than done, but can we afford to do anything less? We have spent trillions of dollars trying to fix similar problems in other countries, so why not spend a tenth of that or a thousandth of that fixing some of the problems in our own country?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  IF you get good teachers, etc. to live in your technocratic war zone, their high salaries jack up the cost of living I've never heard of the cost of living anywhere going up because of an influx of highly-paid K-12 teachers.
  - ReadyCollective 13y ago
    You pay for those teachers typically with property tax revenues. Their pay goes up; your taxes go up. At least, that's how it works in many locales.
    - lobo_tuerto 13y ago
      There is no need for those taxes to go up. You can always redistribute.
grecy 13y ago
> If I were the king, I would fix I've always thought the troops should be brought home and all those trillions spent on infrastructure and community projects within America. Unfortunately, it's more important to spend trillions on other countries than on America and Americans. "If Americans knew what Swedes receive for their taxes, we would probably riot." http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=9650988b07f7e4179af562f17d7753d1 http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?artic...
- r00fus 13y ago
  > Unfortunately, it's more important to spend trillions on other countries than on America and Americans Clarification (I agree with your gist), that money gets funneled through the military industrial complex back into "construction companies" (i.e., haliburton), security companies (i.e., Blackwater/XE) and various other US-based corporate socialism babies. Very little of foreign development money is actually seen by the countries we "occupy" or "assist". Please see Confessions of an economic hit man for more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_...
rayiner 13y ago
I'm not sure about the impact of drug legalization on the local economies of these areas. Right now, the drug trade is actually one of the few sources of remunerative work available for unskilled people in these cities. You mention police arresting people for "possession" but the fact is that they have little time for that around here. There's enough dealers and traffickers to keep them busy. You think all those guys are going to go straight when drugs are legalized? I think legalization would help, don't get me wrong, but I think the positive impact would be a lot less than many opponents of the drug war would like to believe. These areas are already very cheap to build in. Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey practically give away abandoned industrial sites hoping to find companies to take them over. Getting rid of regulations can be iffy. After all, the outputs of polluting activities in Camden flow down the Delaware River to a whole bunch of other people. Fixing education in these communities is intractable. You can't teach kids in a community where gang leaders have more authority than parents. You have to fix the community before you can make a dent in the education problem.
- blisterpeanuts 13y ago
  I should have said "dealing", not "possession". Regarding education, keep in mind that for some if not most children in dysfunctional homes and communities, school is their only hope, the only place where they interact with people who actually care about them (or at least, are supposed to care about them). Cheap buildings aren't enough. You need a full stack, top to bottom, crash program to attract businesses and encourage local entrepreneurship. A special economic zone means low or no taxes for X years, little or no regulatory interference (e.g., zoning laws, architectural requirements, ethnic/gender hiring mandates, union lock-in, etc.), just basically leave them alone and let them build a business in a war zone. Of course, you can't simply suspend OSHA, ADA, and anti-discrimination laws, but if you can make it cheap enough to conduct business, the incentives will outweigh the danger and inconvenience and they will come.
- djs123sdj 13y ago
  Agreed with legalization not necessarily reducing criminal behavior. Where I live in the Bay Area, the reduction in the street drug dealing trade (perhaps due to legalized dispensaries, and also the prevalence of smartphones) has coincided with an increase in the armed robbery and burglary rate. Local police investigators have confirmed that many individuals who have been apprehended for robberies were previously involved in the local drug trade.
mindslight 13y ago
Drugs are the entire basis of their dysfunctional economy. The resources that drive the aggressiveness are supplied by the extremely profitable drug trade. Most people don't want or respect the cops because they benefit from the autonomous zone, and so would rather support their non-state-sanctioned force monopoly. Stop persecuting drugs and we're left with a city that's just poor and would appreciate the official police for providing net safety instead of the current chaos. Only then can the poverty itself be addressed. (As an aside, can we stop with this "regulate and tax" boot-kissing of politicians? We all know that's how they stick their grubby fingers into everything and ruin it; there's no need to encourage it) Also, while this article focuses on the progress being made by the police, if you switch your perspective and imagine yourself living there, it pretty much sounds like the beginnings of a standard sci-fi dystopia.
- Crito 13y ago
  It is more important that we stop breaking up families and rendering people unemployable with pointless drug-related felonies and prison sentences, than it is we stop politicians from sticking their fingers in everything. Taxes on drugs are a small price to pay if it furthers legalization.
  - mindslight 13y ago
    Well of course, if that's the trade off. But promoting it as an integral part of the solution helps perpetuate the same tired government-should-be-involved thinking that caused the problem in the first place. Pragmatically, it wouldn't simply legitimize the current drug dealers overnight. You'd have to sell them on bullshit paperwork and becoming part of a system that they're predisposed to hate. Good luck with that. Also the more complexity that goes into "appropriate" regulation, the more likely that specific (ie used by the upper classes) drugs will be the only ones that get deillegalized. Which will fail to address the actual problem at all.
    - Crito 13y ago
      We shouldn't give a shit about current drug dealers. The idea is to allow other people to provide a safe and consistent product out in the open, out-competing traditional drug dealers. These drug dealers will no longer have the opportunity to exploit children as street-level pushers, those children will get thrown into the legal system realistically erasing all job prospects. Legalized possession of drugs will keep even more innocents out of the legal system, and furthermore will remove many of the tools that police have traditionally used to justify violating people's right. "I smelled weed" will no longer be an excuse that police can use to frisk any minority they please. > "Also the more complexity that goes into "appropriate" regulation, the more likely that specific (ie used by the upper classes) drugs will be the only ones that get deillegalized. Which will fail to address the actual problem at all." The entire class of "we're only legalizing 'upper class' drugs" arguments are complete nonsense. The fact is that disadvantaged minorities are massively over-represented in marijuana arrests, despite using marijuana at similar rates as white americans. > "But promoting it as an integral part of the solution helps perpetuate the same tired government-should-be-involved thinking that caused the problem in the first place." We've got bigger fish to fry. Drug laws are modern Jim Crow laws, concerns about the merits of taxing vices and luxuries have a lower priority.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

auctiontheory 13y ago
IF you get good teachers, etc. to live in your technocratic war zone, their high salaries jack up the cost of living I've never heard of the cost of living anywhere going up because of an influx of highly-paid K-12 teachers.
- ReadyCollective 13y ago
  You pay for those teachers typically with property tax revenues. Their pay goes up; your taxes go up. At least, that's how it works in many locales.
  - lobo_tuerto 13y ago
    There is no need for those taxes to go up. You can always redistribute.

grecy 13y ago

> If I were the king, I would fix I've always thought the troops should be brought home and all those trillions spent on infrastructure and community projects within America. Unfortunately, it's more important to spend trillions on other countries than on America and Americans. "If Americans knew what Swedes receive for their taxes, we would probably riot." http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=9650988b07f7e4179af562f17d7753d1 http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?artic...

r00fus 13y ago
> Unfortunately, it's more important to spend trillions on other countries than on America and Americans Clarification (I agree with your gist), that money gets funneled through the military industrial complex back into "construction companies" (i.e., haliburton), security companies (i.e., Blackwater/XE) and various other US-based corporate socialism babies. Very little of foreign development money is actually seen by the countries we "occupy" or "assist". Please see Confessions of an economic hit man for more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_...

rayiner 13y ago

I'm not sure about the impact of drug legalization on the local economies of these areas. Right now, the drug trade is actually one of the few sources of remunerative work available for unskilled people in these cities. You mention police arresting people for "possession" but the fact is that they have little time for that around here. There's enough dealers and traffickers to keep them busy. You think all those guys are going to go straight when drugs are legalized? I think legalization would help, don't get me wrong, but I think the positive impact would be a lot less than many opponents of the drug war would like to believe. These areas are already very cheap to build in. Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey practically give away abandoned industrial sites hoping to find companies to take them over. Getting rid of regulations can be iffy. After all, the outputs of polluting activities in Camden flow down the Delaware River to a whole bunch of other people. Fixing education in these communities is intractable. You can't teach kids in a community where gang leaders have more authority than parents. You have to fix the community before you can make a dent in the education problem.

blisterpeanuts 13y ago
I should have said "dealing", not "possession". Regarding education, keep in mind that for some if not most children in dysfunctional homes and communities, school is their only hope, the only place where they interact with people who actually care about them (or at least, are supposed to care about them). Cheap buildings aren't enough. You need a full stack, top to bottom, crash program to attract businesses and encourage local entrepreneurship. A special economic zone means low or no taxes for X years, little or no regulatory interference (e.g., zoning laws, architectural requirements, ethnic/gender hiring mandates, union lock-in, etc.), just basically leave them alone and let them build a business in a war zone. Of course, you can't simply suspend OSHA, ADA, and anti-discrimination laws, but if you can make it cheap enough to conduct business, the incentives will outweigh the danger and inconvenience and they will come.
djs123sdj 13y ago
Agreed with legalization not necessarily reducing criminal behavior. Where I live in the Bay Area, the reduction in the street drug dealing trade (perhaps due to legalized dispensaries, and also the prevalence of smartphones) has coincided with an increase in the armed robbery and burglary rate. Local police investigators have confirmed that many individuals who have been apprehended for robberies were previously involved in the local drug trade.

mindslight 13y ago

Drugs are the entire basis of their dysfunctional economy. The resources that drive the aggressiveness are supplied by the extremely profitable drug trade. Most people don't want or respect the cops because they benefit from the autonomous zone, and so would rather support their non-state-sanctioned force monopoly. Stop persecuting drugs and we're left with a city that's just poor and would appreciate the official police for providing net safety instead of the current chaos. Only then can the poverty itself be addressed. (As an aside, can we stop with this "regulate and tax" boot-kissing of politicians? We all know that's how they stick their grubby fingers into everything and ruin it; there's no need to encourage it) Also, while this article focuses on the progress being made by the police, if you switch your perspective and imagine yourself living there, it pretty much sounds like the beginnings of a standard sci-fi dystopia.

Crito 13y ago
It is more important that we stop breaking up families and rendering people unemployable with pointless drug-related felonies and prison sentences, than it is we stop politicians from sticking their fingers in everything. Taxes on drugs are a small price to pay if it furthers legalization.
- mindslight 13y ago
  Well of course, if that's the trade off. But promoting it as an integral part of the solution helps perpetuate the same tired government-should-be-involved thinking that caused the problem in the first place. Pragmatically, it wouldn't simply legitimize the current drug dealers overnight. You'd have to sell them on bullshit paperwork and becoming part of a system that they're predisposed to hate. Good luck with that. Also the more complexity that goes into "appropriate" regulation, the more likely that specific (ie used by the upper classes) drugs will be the only ones that get deillegalized. Which will fail to address the actual problem at all.
  - Crito 13y ago
    We shouldn't give a shit about current drug dealers. The idea is to allow other people to provide a safe and consistent product out in the open, out-competing traditional drug dealers. These drug dealers will no longer have the opportunity to exploit children as street-level pushers, those children will get thrown into the legal system realistically erasing all job prospects. Legalized possession of drugs will keep even more innocents out of the legal system, and furthermore will remove many of the tools that police have traditionally used to justify violating people's right. "I smelled weed" will no longer be an excuse that police can use to frisk any minority they please. > "Also the more complexity that goes into "appropriate" regulation, the more likely that specific (ie used by the upper classes) drugs will be the only ones that get deillegalized. Which will fail to address the actual problem at all." The entire class of "we're only legalizing 'upper class' drugs" arguments are complete nonsense. The fact is that disadvantaged minorities are massively over-represented in marijuana arrests, despite using marijuana at similar rates as white americans. > "But promoting it as an integral part of the solution helps perpetuate the same tired government-should-be-involved thinking that caused the problem in the first place." We've got bigger fish to fry. Drug laws are modern Jim Crow laws, concerns about the merits of taxing vices and luxuries have a lower priority.