Gilligan's Island

To add insult to injury, Detroit is losing not just its status as the "Motor City," it is also losing some of the basic accoutrements of urban living, like grocery stores: Retailers Head For Exits In Detroit

They call this the Motor City, but you have to leave town to buy a Chrysler or a Jeep.

Borders Inc. was founded 40 miles away, but the only one of the chain's bookstores here closed this month. And Starbucks Corp., famous for saturating U.S. cities with its storefronts, has only four left in this city of 900,000 after closures last summer.

There was a time early in the decade when downtown Detroit was sprouting new cafes and shops, and residents began to nurture hopes of a rebound. But lately, they are finding it increasingly tough to buy groceries or get a cup of fresh-roast coffee as the 11th largest U.S. city struggles with the recession and the auto-industry crisis.

No national grocery chain operates a store here. A lack of outlets that sell fresh produce and meat has led the United Food and Commercial Workers union and a community group to think about building a grocery store of its own.

Frankly, a union based solution is hardly what Detroit needs. Unions have dominated Detroit's politics and economy since the Thirties. While there might have been short term benefits for a couple lucky generations of workers, the host has been sucked dry, leaving a dry husk.

Detroit's woes are largely rooted in the collapse of the auto industry. General Motors Corp., one of downtown's largest employers and the last of the Big Three auto makers with its headquarters here, has drastically cut white-collar workers and been offered incentives to move to the suburbs. Other local businesses that serviced the auto maker, from ad agencies and accounting firms to newsstands and shoe-shine outlets, also have been hurt.

The city's 22.8% unemployment rate is among the highest in the U.S.; 30% of residents are on food stamps

Those are not what you would call Demographics of Destiny

While all of southeast Michigan is hurting because of the auto-industry's troubles, Detroit's problems are compounded by decades of flight to the suburbs.

Hundreds of buildings were left vacant by the nearly one million residents who have left. Thousands of businesses have closed since the city's population peaked six decades ago.

Navigating zoning rules and other red tape to develop land for big-box stores that might cater to a low-income clientele is daunting.

I have it on good authority that journalistic trade craft requires that any reporter writing about Detroit must mention "decades of flight to the suburbs" - the dreaded "White Flight" - as if people left for the suburbs in a dastardly plot to destroy Detroit. It is apparently journalistically incorrect to mention decades of inner-city dysfunction, which reached its apogee with the corrupt "hip-hop mayor" Kwame Kilpatrick, in searching for the source of Detroit's ills.

In fact, there is very little effort to look at what really killed Detroit and other formerly prosperous cities in the Rust Belt. These were Democratic strongholds, dominated by corrupt Machine politics, overweening unions, and tax-happy politicians. They are beset with welfare dependents, drugs, slums, and crime. This did not happen overnight. But, slowly but surely, the economically productive portions of the economy funded all of government inertia that ruined the manufacturing heartland of the US until the money-makers were finally bled dry.

If the stock market falls, then there is a rush to the podium to declare the failure of the free market and an end to "illusory GOP growth." But when government policy fails, it seems there is never anyone wlling to demand less government, rather than more, as a solution to the destruction of a once-vibrant economic region. That last bit about retailers having difficulty navigating red tape might be the most ridiculous symbol of uselessly destructive government. What is the point of zoning laws and red tape when the city has been economically decimated? Where is the condemnation when a political philosophy ruins a region like this? Who is left to lift the shackles off of Detroit and its brethren?