For decades Detroit was North America’s poster child for brutal crime, urban decay and corruption. But as Aaron Renn reveals in Commonplace, the Michigan municipality has been rebuilding and even beautifying. Detroit’s crawl back towards proud city-hood began after officials declared bankruptcy in 2013, enabling risk-taking business leaders to resolve the financial crisis, demolish 45,000 vacant eyesore houses and begin anew.
Blueprint for Alberta?
Writing in Jewish World Review, Frederic Fransen reminds Americans of a key lesson from Revolutionary War-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. “The colonies need to declare independence,” Fransen summarizes Paine, “because so long as their goal was seen as reconciliation, foreign governments would consider the Americans as rebels and the conflict an internal affair.” But a unilateral declaration of independence, Fransen notes, instantly converts mere complaints from an aggrieved group into a negotiation between sovereign states.
