In my last post, I wrote about a survey that identified Whitewater as an especially youthful town (mind you, by median age, and only from CNN Money’s limited selection of small towns).
Well, what would the opposite be like: what would age a town, and drive it into decrepitude?
The sarcastic answer, of course, is time, itself: the passage of time makes a place grow older. That, needless to say, isn’t what I have in mind. In fact, time needn’t take a toll. Some societies stay vigorous generation to generation.
Among those forces that would make a place old, even prematurely, I’d suggest (1) regulating excessively, (2) taxing heavily, (3) prohibiting widely, (4) spending profligately from others’ earnings, (5) building vaingloriously from the public coffers, (6) using still more public money to boost one’s undeserving cronies, (7) conflating headlines with facts, (8) ignoring the truly needy, all the while (9) insisting that this is the very definition of serving one’s community.
A community like that would tire and age prematurely from the damage those bad policies would necessarily inflict on an otherwise vigorous and energetic place.
Dirigisme like this benefits a few at the expense – in vigor and productivity – of the many.
That’s a partial list of what ages an otherwise active place.