So the BBC is using Detroit as an example to report on an “urban farming movement” that could “save crumbling inner cities around the world and tackle hunger.” A liberal website in Michigan characterizes this as a “wonderful example of how . . . people can come together to tackle serious challenges in our communities.”

Can they really be that blind to what an abject admission of absolute and total failure this is?

Detroit once held some 2 million people, but now contains an alienated remainder of less than 900,000 - a figure that is falling rapidly. Vast areas of the city’s 139 square miles are all but depopulated, rows of mouldering vacant houses interspersed with burned-out hulks and many, many vacant, weed-and-garbage strewn lots. (Graphic image here.) The unemployment rate is 17.7 percent, and the only surprise is that it's not much higher, despite the fact that the labor force comprises just 40.5 percent of the population, vs. 49.2 percent for Michigan as a whole. Detroit's corrupt school system graduates less than 25 percent of its students - the lowest of any large city district.

The notion of "urban farming" in this environment reminds of a scene in Atlas Shrugged, after the “shrug”: An American is hitched to a plough, dragging it through a corner of a field like a beast of burden just to eke out sustenance for herself and few others, when just a short time previously, before bad ideas had destroyed the great civilization, a single tractor would have worked that field and fed thousands. In this instance, the “field” is the shining city where they used to build the tractors (more likely their motors).

That one scene in a novel - just a brief image in a scene, really – has long symbolized for me the consequences of letting a great civilization be destroyed by bad ideas. The causes of Detroit’s decline are many and varied, but bad ideas and moral disintegration are right at the front of the pack.

Frankly, the mindset that could describe “urban farming” as a “wonderful example” of anything other than a heartbreaking tragedy is very likely a product of the same destructive ideas that brought down Detroit.

Cross-posted from Students for a Free Economy