New York City progressives want to import Vienna’s social housing model to fix the Big Apple’s affordability crisis – and Canadian activists would likely feel the same way. The central European capital has certainly promoted its approach as a global success story. But as Tobias Peter demonstrates in City Journal, Vienna’s 100-year-old experiment is expensive, complicated, prejudicial and increasingly unsustainable – not a model but a cautionary tale.
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.
