We are on strike against martyrdom—and against the moral code that demands it. We are on strike against those who believe that one man must exist for the sake of another. We are on strike against the morality of cannibals, be it practiced in body or in spirit. We will not deal with men on any terms but ours—and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others.
- Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
The first shot has been fired: the LAPD is about to have its budget cut by $250M and that money wasted on far-left organizations.
The mayor said he would be more specific about where those monies will go in his Thursday night press conference, and that the funding would be distributed “now, not years from now.”
Garcetti also declared a moratorium on putting people in the gang data base, requiring police officers to always report bad actors and increasing discipline against those officers who break the rules.
“We need to move toward a guardian-based system,” said the mayor, “by developing long term relationships between our youth and police officers.”
This comes after Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore on Monday compared looters to those officers involved in George Floyd’s death.
Garcetti announced a Civil and Human Rights Commission that will have its first meeting next week, with a promise to have the department up and running by July 1. In that department will reside an Office of Racial Equity to help the city “apply and equity lens to everything we do.”
“We can’t walk to the promised land in a single day,’ said Garcetti, “but this is a start.”
Kurn was talking about the Atlas Shrugged Moment a few days ago, I don't know if he knew how prescient he was really going to be. As income and work get "decoupled", as happened in the novel, the working people† realized that they were fools for waking up every morning, going to work, risking life and limb especially true for cops, investing time and labour, and assuming non-physical risk. In the end, as many small business owners discover, they are making less than welfare bums. When drivers of economic activity in particular had their Atlas Shrugged Moment, society broke down as it turns out without private enterprise creating wealth no wealth actually gets created. Machines and human bodies need continual maintenance, so costs don't drop while income does, and everything collapses.
† Yes, yes, Objectivists, I know...publicly funded government employees aren't actually workers who produce things, even when their individual tasks have value. But actually this makes it worse: now we have government money going to a job which the state has monopolized which still doesn't get done even though in a free market it would have tremendous value
LAPD had been planning to rise from $1.189B to $1.86B, a $671M increase. Instead they will get a $250M cut which amounts to a 21% budget slashing. As with most large government departments the vast majority of the budget goes to staffing: when the LAPD was spared cuts due to the Wuhan Flu in April, there were roughly 10,000 officers and 3000 civilian workers in the agency. In 2016-207 "obligatory salaries" made up $1.358 billion worth of the LAPD budget[PDF] which presumably was under $1.189B this year (total budget was $1.66B in 2016-2017) as there have been some attrition reported over the past few years (and new employees are cheaper than old employees).
“Why yes, I can," said Midas Mulligan, when he was asked whether he could name a person more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity. "The man who uses another's pity for him as a weapon.”
- Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
But what happens when LAPD has to start cutting salaries? What happens when additional micromanaging (another Atlas Shrugged hallmark in the form of increased government regulation) beyond this database thing starts being forced on line officers? I'm sure this "Office of Racial Equality" and "Civil and Human Rights Commission" will start putting further demands on officers. It's one thing when civilian oversight of the police brings in new rules and procedures, that sort of thing is relatively routine. It's quite another when it comes with less pay, more personal risk, and in the final Atlas Shrugged lynchpin the vilification of you and your job by the government and general populace.America has seen a small taste of what happens when law enforcement is required to back off and/or stand down. One imagines that Chief Michel Moore (no relation, presumably) doesn't have the stomach of a Hank Rearden and will back down and be as contrite as poor Stockwell Day. In that sort of a world the looting and rioting seen recently across the United States will become the new normal in the City of Angels: the only difference is that if people know that the LAPD is never going to come a-callin' to enforce the law, then more and more property owners will take the law into their own hands. Funny, when a couple of guys in Georgia did that earlier this year everybody lost their minds over that too.
There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.
- Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
The results of a mass-police Atlast Shrugged moment across America? Combined with a lot of businesses operating in black neighbourhoods similarly deciding that the pursuit of wealth and success isn't worth being regularly burnt to the ground (or worse), they will retreat out of the black communities. Then the blacks will cry "inequality" and more Clinton-era housing laws will push them into communities they should not be able to afford. Another set of riots and more businesses leaving and then more businesses just deciding not to reopen. Whether in the modern technocrat age there can really be an Atlantis or not is ultimately irrelevent: whether it's a real place, a Unimatrix Zero virtual land, or just everybody collecting food stamps until it all collapses, the result will be the same. The looters will take over and America will become another third world socialist hellhole.
It was as if a volcano were cracking open, yet the people at the foot of the mountain ignored the sudden fissures, the black fumes, the boiling trickles, and went on believing that their only danger was to acknowledge the reality of these signs.
- Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
One may argue that a free open society is worth fighting for. d'Anconia and Daniels certainly believed so, but many others took the John Galt route. It's unclear as of yet which bification of the American Dream is coming...but to imagine neither of them is likely will be foolhardy.
