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The Nation's Pulse
Murder, Tulips, and Taxes
Chicago goes the extra mile to prettify its ugly reality.
Last Tuesday, we took the midnight train to Chicago.
It’s an easy ride, with a bedroom both ways — except I get the top bunk, which feels like I’m stuffed in a 1942 troop train heading off to battle the Nazis.
Getting up and down the ladder in cramped quarters gets tougher each year, especially when the train makes quick jerks and big sways (this isn’t France with smooth bullet trains — and our tracks are old and crooked, not unlike Goldman Sachs).
I picture myself crashing through the window some night and ending up in the gravel along some Godforsaken stretch of tracks.
But sleeping comes easy with the swaying back and forth. We’re like a bunch of babies nodding off in a supersized rocking chair.
The first call for breakfast in the dining car is at 6:30 a.m., with coffee and fresh red carnations on the tables and a choice of scrambled eggs or freshly cooked oatmeal with plump golden raisins.
Unlike stopping on the road to eat and losing time, the train allows a quadrupling of getting things done — you can simultaneously watch the miles go by, eat breakfast, listen to your wife and read the newspaper. Or it’s a quintuple if you’re also on the cell phone or the computer.
Near our destination and chugging through the Chicago rail yards, I noticed a story-high painting glorifying (!) Osama bin Laden on the concrete wall of an overpass amid the junk and litter. It’s a stylized picture, reminiscent of the old paintings of saints on church walls in Italy.
To some graffiti artist in this sorrier section of town, I suppose bin Laden is viewed as a hero of the dispossessed.
On the other side of the tracks, literally, in a cab on the way to our hotel, we were greeted with tens of thousands of tulips of every color in full bloom for miles in the city’s planters on Michigan Avenue.
Our hotel is the grand old Hilton Chicago, facing Lake Michigan, opened in 1927 with great fanfare. There’s a two-story Conrad Suite atop the hotel — separate in style from the rest of the building. Viewed from afar, it looks like an opulent old mansion erected on the roof. It’s $8,000 per night, plus tax.
The tulips on Michigan Avenue come with an annual maintenance cost of $250,000. They’ll be gone in a few days, replaced with thousands of summer bloomers, and then by truckloads of mums.
“Flowers make people calm,” said former Mayor Richard M. Daley, kicking off an effort in 1989 to make Chicago “the greenest city in America.”
The mayor probably had that backwards. Rather than tulips making people calm, I think calm people plant tulips, while the un-calm do things like crack.
Either way, the mayor put the flowers where the people were already calm, rather than in the killing fields of the city.
About the Author
Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise and an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (19) | Leave a comment
More Articles by Ralph R. Reiland
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R Martin| 6.1.11 @ 8:11AM
“…and our tracks are old and crooked, not unlike Goldman Sachs”
Mr. Reiland, you’re on your way to Chicago seeking a simile for old and crooked, and the best you can come up with is Goldman Sachs? Good grief! With that sort of thinking perhaps you deserve to crash through the window and end-up in the gravel beside the tracks.
You teach free enterprise and economics yet suggest a weakened financial sector will not impede the recovery of business prosperity and job growth which seem to be the subject of your narrative.
You take a cheap shot at Goldman but ignore the bigger problem that all those murders, all that crack consumption and all the ugly graffiti is perpetrated largely by recipients of government transfer payments.
Disappointing, sir.
Redstateboy| 6.1.11 @ 8:21AM
Look at Chicago, St. Louis, Wash. DC., Buffalo, Detroit, Los Angeles, Killadelphia - any major American city (or State) where the Slave (Democrat) Party has held complete sway for decades and what do you find? High taxes, poor education, ghastly crime rates, bloated bureaucracies and decay. There is No denying it.
This is the result of a timelessly failed political philosophy and this is precisely what guides Das Messiah - this is his vision for America - to turn the United States in to one big fat failed Socialist Republic because he, like so many citizens in this Nation are blinded to Biblical proportions to their own stupidity.
Pellligrino| 6.1.11 @ 4:51PM
Please add Baltimore and East St. Louis to this list.
A long, sad, ugly list of very real ongoing failures.
Dan Hirsch| 6.1.11 @ 8:41AM
Illinois is the last holdout against concealed carry. So the boys in the hood don't have to worry about the suckers (that would be you and me.) ever firing back at them.
Concealed carry is not the end of all crime in a densely populated city like Chicago. But at least, you could defend yourself and the bad guys would have to think twice.
For example, on Memorial Day, the police had to close the Oak Street Beach (Ground zero for Lake Michigan and the Magnificent Mile, sort of.) Because a 'flash mob' of young black thug types were harassing and assaulting cyclists, skaters, and joggers on the adjacent lakefront bike path. I bet that concealed carry would greatly reduce that kind of nonsense.
When confronted, one just taps his concealed weapon and says, "Don't make me shoot you!" Thug decides it is really not that much fun and goes to play elsewhere.
Sheesh - New Boss same as the Old Boss....
But don't worry in Illinois, the legislature just reaffirmed that only the criminals are armed - the law abiding citizens are just soft targets...
Vince| 6.1.11 @ 2:12PM
The msm reported the Oak Street Beach was closed due to heat.
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Pecos Pete| 6.1.11 @ 9:27AM
Chicago will become Detroit. Or worse.
Dustoff| 6.1.11 @ 10:01AM
It isn't already?
C. Vail| 6.1.11 @ 10:08AM
For godsakes, get to the point man! No one has time to read seven or eight paragraphs of set-up before you finally get to the nitty-gritty.
PolishKnight| 6.1.11 @ 10:14AM
If only there were as many prostitutes as flowers in Chicago, then the crime rate would really go down.
The welfare state created a family run by unwed mothers with the taxpayer as substitute father-breadwinner. Saint Thomas Aquinas pointed out that if you outlaw prostitution, then normal women become whores. So Chicago and other innner cities are at the forefront of women being trashy and using children as a way to get taxpayers to support them that is spreading to the rest of society.
Ironically, as this story was published, Chicago just legalized gambling in an effort to raise revenue.
This may sound wierd to people here, but I think it's "conservative" for a man to go to a prostitute and do a bit of gambling when he's young, get it out of his system, and then marry a "nice" girl. The current system where young men (and women) sleep around and then maybe marry the person they've shacked up for a while with has been disasterous.
Chris Pedersen| 6.1.11 @ 6:39PM
There are as many Prositutes in Chicago as there are Flowers.
It's called "The Racketeering Chicago City Council"
VANdevil | 6.6.11 @ 7:23AM
Interesting observation!
WayneFarmer| 6.1.11 @ 1:43PM
PolishKnight's spelling is as faulty as are his morals. If Aquinas said it, it still defies the plan of God for man & woman. And if PolishKnight repeats it, it is still ungodly and immoral. Obedience to God is neither conservative nor liberal -- it is right, vs. wrong.
Chris Pedersen| 6.1.11 @ 6:34PM
CHICAGO-A Criminal Racketeering Enterprise!
cuban pete| 6.1.11 @ 6:39PM
The Illinois legislature just drew up new districts which will further diminish GOP representation.
Now the dems can take the whole state down once and for all. I'll probably survive but it is over for my grandkids. Business will be leaving in droves.
Rahm will run the whole circus from the fifth floor of city hall in Chicago.
But there will be plenty of casinos.
Rich Rostrom| 6.1.11 @ 7:18PM
The high corporate income tax rate is a problem...
But the big increase in the *personal* income tax rate (from 3% to 5%) is a real punch in the nose.
Add Chicago's nearly 10% sales tax rate, and it's no wonder people are leaving.
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Pelligrino| 6.1.11 @ 11:51PM
You really cannot claim America to be a great place when every city/metropolotian area with a population of over 300,000 is unsafe (thus uninhabitable).
What is wrong with us?
I have written this here before and one gets nothing but website commentary shoulder shrugs that say, "C'mon, you can't fix these things. Don't get agitated about it."
Well, I am agitated. I'm more than peeved. I am FURIOUS.
Our cities should be more than places you can just visit in daylight in large groups for safety.
Trust me. There are countries in this world where an aging senior citizen can just remain in his or her inner city apartment until death. Here? No way. If you love your parent(s), you're stealing them away to an infinitely safer environment.
But on the inside your parent is very unhappy. You've just taken him or her away from the "home" they know.
We are really sick.
We collectively shrug our shoulders and say there's nothing to be done; this is inevitable.
Vast "no-go zones" called our cities. They number in the hundreds in this land.
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