The Wall Street Journal - 23.08.2019

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Friday, August 23, 2019 |A

‘New Left Urbanists’ Want to Remake Your City

dictate how people live and set right

society’s socioeconomic, racial and

moral deficiencies.

One widely circulated left-urbanist

plan from April 2018 comes from the

People’s Policy Project, a crowd-

funded socialist think tank. The au-

thors, Peter Gowan and Ryan Cooper,

envision the construction of 10 mil-

lion “municipal homes” over the next

decade. The proposal imagines local

governments building more housing

units than the private construction

industry and becoming the largest

landlord in many cities.

The abysmal record of public

housing in the U.S., from crime to de-

cay, makes no difference to these ur-

banists. They rebrand “housing proj-

ects” as “municipal homes” and

assert that new units will resemble

neighborhoods in Stockholm, Vienna

and Helsinki, rather than Detroit,

Newark and Oakland.

Activists are concerned not only

with the quantity of new housing but

also with who builds and lives in it.

New developments must be govern-

ment-run and tick off the boxes of

identity politics. In San Francisco,

some activists oppose all private

housing construction. A 2017 essay

in the San Francisco Examiner called

advocates for more market housing

part of a “libertarian, anti-poor cam-

paign to turn longtime sites of pro-

gressive organizing into rich-people-

only zones” and compared them to

white nationalists.

One might dismiss this as radical

posturing, but public-housing advo-

cates have seized real power in city

halls. They’ve learned how to use the

zoning and permitting bureaucracy

to stanch private development. In

San Francisco’s Mission District,

laundromat owner Bob Tillman had

to spend $1.4 million and nearly five

years to gain permission to convert

his business into an apartment build-

ing. Activists and their enablers in

City Hall claimed the laundry busi-

ness was “historic” and that develop-

ment would displace minority resi-

dents. At one point the planning

commission hired a “shadow consul-

tant” to assess whether the shadows

cast by the proposed building could

cause harm to the community.

In New York City, progressive ur-

banists have focused on public trans-

portation. The subway system was

designed mostly in the early 20th

century to serve the practical needs

of New Yorkers, but today’s activists

see it as a grand instrument for cos-

mic justice.

In the Straphangers Campaign’s

2018 “Transportation and Equity” re-

port, the advocacy group begins from

the premise that “the most vulnera-

ble New Yorkers suffer dispropor-

tionately from high fares, long com-

mutes, polluted air, and dangerous

streets.” It ends up estimating that

an additional $30 billion in tax reve-

nue would be needed for its desired

overhaul: upgrading 11 subway lines,

building 130 new accessible stations,

and purchasing more than 3,000 new

subway cars, along with nearly 5,

new buses, over the next 10 years.

While state and local leaders ha-

ven’t signed up for this ambitious

plan, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Bill

de Blasio and other local politicians

have expressed support for some of

the activists’ funding proposals, in-

cluding congestion pricing, a “mil-

lionaire’s tax,” a marijuana tax, a

stock-transfer tax and even a $3-a-

package tax on Amazon deliveries.

There’s a reasonable argument for

congestion pricing in traffic-glutted

Manhattan and for more investment

in mass transit. But the Straphang-

ers’ long-term vision involves elimi-

nation of the automobile, which re-

mains a middle-class staple in the

outer boroughs. Their plan would re-

strict curbside space for cars by

building “protected bike lanes on all

major arterial streets across the five

boroughs,” “giving developers incen-

tives to contribute toward sustain-

able transportation over private ve-

hicle usage,” and eliminating parking

requirements for new housing.

Activists use euphemisms like

“transportation alternatives” and

“transportation choices,” but at heart

their vision is about control. They

want to remake the urban infrastruc-

ture in their own image: green, moral

and in solidarity with the masses—at

least as those masses exist in their

imagination.

The new left urbanists’ fatal mis-

take is to view cities as collections of

buildings, roads, tunnels and bike

lanes. Urbanists can demolish and re-

build physical environments, but

they can’t pave over the people. Life

in a metropolis is simply too com-

plex, too variable and too ephem-

eral—it will evade even the most

careful planning. Making cities better

and more beautiful requires bringing

neighbors, developers, employers

and governments into the conversa-

tion. Thriving cities are built through

cooperation, not compulsion.

Mr. Rufo is a contributing editor

of City Journal, from whose Summer

issue this is adapted.

By Christopher F. Rufo

CHAD CROWE

A

merica’s big cities are al-
most all dominated by the
Democratic Party, but the
politics of urban develop-
ment are far from mono-
lithic. In the past few years, a new fac-
tion has emerged across the country.
Call them the new left urbanists.
These activists have big dreams.
They want local governments to re-
build the urban environment—hous-
ing, transit, roads and tolls—to
achieve social justice, racial justice
and net-zero carbon emissions. They
rally around slogans such as “ban all

cars,” “raze the suburbs” and “single-
family housing is white suprem-
acy”—though they’re generally white
and affluent themselves, often em-
ployed in public or semipublic roles
in urban planning, housing develop-
ment and social advocacy. They treat
public housing, mass transit and bike
lanes as a holy trinity, and they want
to impose their religion on you.
“The residential is political,”
wrote new left urbanists David Mad-
den and Peter Marcuse in 2016. “The
shape of the housing system is al-
ways the outcome of struggles be-
tween different groups and classes.”
By dictating how cities build new
housing, the logic goes, urbanists can

It’s about control—using

infrastructure to make the

masses conform to one

vision of how to live.

OPINION

India Should Quit Harassing the ‘Super-Rich’

How should a poor
country treat its
rich? Nearly three
decades ago, India
embarked upon free-
market economic re-
forms after a failed
dalliance with state
planning that almost
drove it to bank-
ruptcy. It looked as
though the country
had settled the question. The world’s
second most populous nation—like
Deng Xiaoping’s China before it—
would shed its suspicion of private
business. To get rich would be glori-
ous in India, too.
Today things look less certain.
Needing resources to fund an ever-
expanding list of social programs for
the poor, Prime Minister Narendra
Modi’s government has doubled
down on soaking the rich. Last
month’s budget proposes what the
media have called a “super-rich
tax”—a 25% surcharge on the tax lev-
ied against incomes over 20 million
rupees (about $275,000) and 37%
over 50 million rupees. This takes the
effective tax rates up to 39% and
42.7%. (Currently, a 15% surcharge
applies to incomes over 50 million
rupees.)
The Modi administration has also

weaponized a cockamamie idea pio-

neered by its predecessor—that large

companies must spend 2% of their

profits on projects in keeping with

“corporate social responsibility.” It

proposed three-year jail terms for ex-

ecutives whose mandatory CSR

spending does not pass government

scrutiny. An uproar has forced the

government to promise not to “opera-

tionalize” this decision.

Add to this growing “tax terror-

ism,” the Indian term for harassment

by officials, and some of the highest

corporate tax rates in Asia (30% on

large firms), and you get a picture of

businessmen increasingly squeezed

by a greedy government. Last month

the founder of a popular Indian coffee

chain, Coffee Day Enterprises, alleg-

edly committed suicide citing pres-

sure from creditors and harassment

by tax officials.

“In India, being against the

wealthy is associated with being pro-

poor,” says Naushad Forbes, a former

president of the Confederation of In-

dian Industry. “It’s a throwback to

the populism of Indira Gandhi.” Mr.

Forbes adds that India is nowhere

near where it was under Gandhi in

the 1970s and 1980s—at one point

marginal income-tax rates reached

97.5%. Nonetheless, the signs of ex-

cessive government zeal are familiar.

Last month, Finance Minister Nir-

mala Sitharaman waved off concerns

about higher taxes by pointing out

that “not more than 5,000 people” in

India could be categorized as “super-

rich.” But this is precisely the prob-

lem. In Indian public life, steeped for

decades in leftist rhetoric, nobody

points out the other side of the argu-

ment: In a nation of more than 1.3 bil-

lion people, a few thousand wealthy

citizens already shoulder a dispro-

portionate share of the tax burden.

According to analysis by the busi-

ness newspaper Mint, the top 1% of

India’s taxpayers contribute one-

third of income taxes. At first glance

this appears similar to the U.S.,

where the top 1% pay 37% of taxes, or

the U.K., where they pay about 30%.

But in India the top 1% accounts for

just 840,000 people, or 0.06% of the

population. Compare that to America

where the top 1% is made up of 1.

million people, or 0.4% of the popu-

lation. The problem is not that

wealthy Indians pay too little in

taxes. It’s that there are too few

wealthy Indians.

For now the new taxes, which also

apply to foreign companies struc-

tured as trusts, have helped batter fi-

nancial markets. The benchmark

Nifty fell nearly 6% last month after

foreign portfolio investors pulled out

more than $1 billion.

But instead of worrying about

market fluctuations—driven by not

only capricious tax policy but also

broader concerns about sluggish

growth, anemic corporate balance

sheets, and a global slowdown—Ms.

Sitharaman and her officials ought to

consider something more fundamen-

tal: Can India afford to drive away its

wealthy?

Many elite business families have

other options. Their children typi-

cally study in the U.S. or U.K., and are

often as comfortable in New York,

Toronto or London as at home. And

it’s not as though the rest of the

world’s wealthy are beating a path to

India to breathe Delhi’s famous air or

experience Mumbai’s legendary traf-

fic. Last year Morgan Stanley re-

ported that 23,000 U.S.-dollar mil-

lionaires had exited India since 2014.

Many have relocated to better-run

Dubai and Singapore.

In his Independence Day speech on

Aug. 15, Mr. Modi showed signs of

grasping the problem. “Wealth cre-

ation is a great national service,” he

declared. “Let us never see wealth

creators with suspicion.” This is wel-

come rhetoric, but for it to mean any-

thing it will have to percolate to the

bureaucracy.

What could Mr. Modi do to show

that he indeed values wealth cre-

ators? For starters, the government

could keep a promise first made by

then-Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in

2015 to lower corporate taxes to 25%.

It could also revoke draconian pow-

ers of arrest and seizure handed to

relatively low-level tax officials, and

end the practice of setting them reve-

nue targets, which only increases

abuse and corruption.

Reversing the super-rich tax in the

face of protest would signal not

weakness, but rather reasonableness.

Scrapping the absurdity of manda-

tory CSR spending would signal that

India understands a basic tenet of

capitalism: Companies do good by

pursuing profit.

Mr. Modi says he wants nearly to

double the size of India’s economy, to

$5 trillion by 2024. This won’t hap-

pen unless India exits the ranks of

countries that harass the rich and

joins those that welcome them.

Boosting taxes on high

earners won’t bring in the

revenue Modi needs. It

will drive out the wealthy.

EAST IS
EAST
By Sadanand
Dhume

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Hitler and Stalin Weren’t Such Strange Bedfellows

K

nown officially as the Treaty
of Non-Aggression Between
Germany and the Union of So-
viet Socialist Republics, the Hitler-
Stalin pact—signed 80 years ago Fri-
day—stunned the world. Some said
that by uniting implacable ideologi-
cal foes it had turned isms into
wasms.
That wasn’t quite right. As Ger-
man negotiator Karl Schnurre had
observed the month before, “despite
all the differences in their respective
worldviews, there is one common el-
ement in the ideologies of Germany,
Italy and the Soviet Union: opposi-
tion to the capitalist democracies.
Neither we nor Italy have anything in
common with the capitalist West.
Therefore it seems to us rather un-
natural that a socialist state would
stand on the side of the Western de-

mocracies.” Since capitalist democ-

racy was their common enemy, why

not pool resources?

Hitler and Stalin had demonized

each other over several years, but

they also had interlocking interests.

Hitler wanted to invade Poland with-

out fear of war on two fronts, so he

had to neutralize the Soviets. He also

needed access to Russia’s natural re-

sources. Stalin coveted German in-

dustrial and weapons technology. To

his cadre, he explained that he could

destroy Germany later, after Hitler

had assisted him in destroying the

most “reactionary” imperialist capi-

talist countries, England and France.

Though some balked, most commu-

nists world-wide acquiesced. Even

the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm

later acknowledged he’d had “no res-

ervations” about it at the time.

Hitler invaded Poland on Sept. 1,

1939. Sixteen days later, so did Sta-

lin, allegedly to “protect” the newly

occupied “brothers of the same

blood.” As revealed only after the

war’s end, the dual move had been

effectively sanctioned by a Secret

Protocol accompanying the pact,

which defined the borders of Soviet

and German “spheres of interest” in

Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia,

Finland and parts of Romania.

Joseph Maiolo, a historian at

King’s College London, wrote in 2014

that the arrangement “enabled the

two regimes to experiment in brutal

imposition of their ideological visions

on the peoples of Eastern Europe.”

British historian Roger Moorhouse,

whose 2014 book, “The Devils’ Alli-

ance,” incorporates recently released

Soviet-era documents, amply demon-

strates that “a remarkable symmetry

emerged between the occupation pol-

icies adopted by the Nazis and the

Soviets....Thetwosides even em-

ployed similar tactics: deportation,

hard labor, and execution.”

The devils’ alliance seemed cor-

dial. In December 1939, Hitler wished

Stalin on his birthday “a happy fu-

ture with the peoples of a friendly

Soviet Union.” Stalin responded with

a toast to “the friendship between

the peoples of the Soviet Union and

Germany, cemented in blood.” But

when Stalin occupied part Northern

Bukovina, part of Romania, in the

summer of 1940, Hitler is said to

have flown into a rage. Hitler wor-

ried about the proximity of Soviet

forces to the Romanian oil fields,

which were indispensable to Ger-

many. Minister of Propaganda Jo-

seph Goebbels wrote in his diary in

early July 1940: “Maybe we will have

to move against the Soviets after

all.”

On June 22, 1941, they did. Stalin

didn’t believe the intelligence warn-

ing of a German invasion. But he

soon came up with a rationalization

for his oversight: The pact had se-

cured his country months of peace

and provided “the opportunity” to

rearm. That became the official line.

The Secret Protocol, which revealed

Stalin’s real strategy, was never men-

tioned. Rumors of its existence circu-

lated, and an English translation was

published by the St. Louis Post-Dis-

patch. Only in 1948 did the U.S. State

Department release an official copy,

alongside thousands of other docu-

ments seized from the Germans.

Moscow issued a communiqué de-

claring it a forgery and itself “of-

fended” at the “falsification of his-

tory.”

The victims of the pact knew bet-

ter. But four more decades passed

until at last, on Aug. 23, 1989, some

two million people formed a human

chain nearly 400 miles long across

the Baltic republics to mark what

came to be known as Black Ribbon

Day. The Berlin Wall crumbled that

Nov. 9. On Dec. 28, 1989, Pravda ac-

knowledged that the Secret Protocol

had been signed in 1939, and that it

violated “the sovereignty and inde-

pendence of a number of third-party

countries.” The charade was over.

Ms. Pilon is a senior fellow at the

Alexander Hamilton Institute for the

Study of Western Civilization and

author of the forthcoming “The Uto-

pian Conceit and the War on Free-

dom.”

By Juliana Geran Pilon

They’d demonized each

other but had in common a

bitter opposition to the

capitalist democracies.

Hayley Peterson for Business In-

sider, Aug. 21:

I went to Walmart with the inten-

tion of buying a gun last week as part

of an investigation into the place-

ment, selection, marketing, and secu-

rity of firearms in Walmart’s stores,

and to learn more about the retailer’s

processes governing gun sales....

I arrived at the sporting-goods de-

partment around noon....After

waiting for about 10 minutes, I

walked to another aisle and found

someone to help me.

I told her I wanted to buy a gun.

She said she was an authorized seller

and that she could help me....

She charged me $2 for a federal

background check, then left the

counter and returned a few minutes

later with a form titled “Department

of State Police Virginia Firearms

Transaction Record.”...Shestopped

me and asked whether the address

on my license matched my home ad-

dress. I had moved since I obtained

my license, and the addresses didn’t

match....Topassthebackground

check, I would need to bring in a

government-issued document with

my correct address, such as a bill

from a state-owned utility or a car

registration.... She apologized, told

me the rules were strict around

background checks, and asked me to

come back another time to finish the

purchase....

I left the store empty-handed—

again.

At this point, I decided to give up

on buying a gun at Walmart.

Notable & Quotable: Walmart