Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Deconcentrate the Rich

The City of Cincinnati has decided to right wrong thinking of the past and, in an effort to deghettoize neighborhoods like Over the Rhine by deconcentrating the poor through the deconcentration social services.
Wish 'em luck. I agree with the concept but don't know as legislation is the way to go.
In our current financial/economic meltdown, a big reason we are in the mess we are in is because of a concentration of great deal of wealth in a few people's hands. When these few people screw up, vast assets and people and businesses are screwed up. The gummint has decided to fix the problem by throwing money at it, (as usual). The problem here is that even more sums of money are being put into the hands of the few who screwed up in the first place. In fact, even fewer as some of the institutions have used their bailout money to acquire other institutions thereby concentrating even more assets into the hands of even fewer screw ups.
While these large companies are not monopolies (yet), it seems that breaking them up might be a better plan. Many smaller financial institutions are doing just fine with smaller, more manageable stores of assets.
Breaking the larger companies up would broaden the brain pool of managers, create jobs and foster creativity and competition.
An argument for deconcentrating the poor is that people who have made bad life choices shouldn't be reinforcing their ideas on one another and that by assimilating them into "good" neighborhoods the better life choices of those people might rub off on them. If it is supposed to work for the poor, it probably oughtta work ok for the rich, too.

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