Brown in many ways is the color of April. The dirt and ground is brown or gray, with the snow mostly gone but still too cold for things to green up in the more upland areas. Mud and muck get on the boots, the air often has a pungent taste to it in farm country. The warmth of May sometimes breaks through in April, but color is limited, for this is not a month known for it’s diverse color.
Some people don’t like the government designing programs that make the default option the right choice for most people. Because some people call that social engineering. The thing is that just because something is default, it doesn’t mean you have to choose it or that it’s necessarily right for you.
Social engineering really is not a bad thing, if the defaults are sensible and good policy.
An un-engineered policy, often defaults to the wrong option for most people. So your essentially pushing people to do the wrong thing, which is not good government policy. Many social engineering policies are widely accepted, and exist through out society, though they are often not explicitly called social engineering.
Lot less snow around compared to last year to start out spring.
While we are still about a month from a full outbreak of spring weather in the city, I thought I post some tulip pictures to get us into the spring feeling as we wrap up March.
At Washington Park.
At the State Capitol.
Tulips and the Egg on the Plaza.
A burst of color in front of the Moses statue.
The idealistic architect Minoru Yamasaki designed Pruitt-Igeo, the World Trade Center, and many other buildings during the 1950s and 1960s. Built in the modernist style, the buildings ultimately failed to reform the people they were designed to inspire and quickly fell into disrepair and became dangerous cesspools only a few years after opening.
America is the wealthiest society in the world, we have a moral obligation to help the poor. Yet, Minoru Yamasaki idealism and plan to help the poor with beautiful high-rise buildings set in a park setting with playgrounds, stores and clean, modern apartments with running hot water, heat and flush toilets proved to be disaster that ultimately would be blown up and hauled off to the landfill. Remember, many cold-water flat tenants prior to his buildings bathed with hot-water in a bucket, with water available only in common areas. You can blame really two things — cost cutting and top-down planning that was unresponsive to community needs.
Pruitt-Igoe is emblematic of what is wrong with Big Government liberalism — a bold vision for a better tomorrow, that inevitably fails to make a better community. It’s not saying we shouldn’t help the down-trodden build a better life, but it shouldn’t come from big centralized government programs that aren’t build for unique communities. Big buildings are great for politicians to cut ribbons on, but they rarely suit community needs. Liberalism should focus on small problems at community level, and move away from big national programs that don’t reflect local community conditions.
Big ideas are impossibly expensive to implement, especially with the inflation pressures that any big program is bound to create in the economy. The high cost of implementation doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. And that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t help working families get ahead. But we should do it in a measured steps, making small changes to existing programs to make it better. We shouldn’t take a bulldozer to existing programs, but instead look to build on what has proven to be successful. It’s hard for politicians to take credit for small changes, but small changes are often the best way to make the world a better place for ordinary people.