Sorry if my position disturbs your sensibilities. I don't even mean slaveholders in a pejorative sense. It was an economic system organic to the history of the American republic. Many of the slaveholders were undoubtedly good people and many of the non-slaveholders were not. Regardless, the slaveholders position ruled at the constitution writing and we are left with much of what they did today. Our constitution is ill-adapted to the modern world. It is not a system prone to adaption. It is a system prone to the idolatry we see in the mass media trickling down to this blog.

His positions on taxation, public education and Prospect Park in the 1970s are equally well founded.

ddartley: Increasing municipal budgets leads to harm, as it A) Increases taxes for B) Dubious projects, which C) Eventually encourage people to leave. The most worthwhile aspects of NYC are a result of private behavior, and that goes especially for the vitality of its neighborhoods. Example: Prospect Park without a nearby Park Slope would be almost unusable (as it was in the 1970s), but an ugly park-less neighborhood like Williamsburg now functions quite nicely. And it wasn't government funding that created Williamsburg.

Also: Of course public highways influenced people to leave the city. But that's nothing compared with NYC public schools influencing people to leave the city. If people's preferences were determined by public spending, we would all be competing to live in public housing and being cared for at public hospitals.

Incidentally, I do not think that public highways are a particularly good idea, either. The Cross Bronx Expressway (Or the LIE, the Gowanus, etc.) are hardly examples of efficient transportation. A privately-operated highway system would instead be quite beneficial. And talk about your congestion pricing: The highway companies would see to it that there would never be congestion again. No one makes money when the cars aren't moving.

Obama's movement toward an "urban solution" is largely in line with his "change" mantra... in that sense, the biofuels stuff is as rhetorically out of whack as it is on a policy level. In lakoff-speak, he subtly reinforcing McCain's frame with that.

But it could be argued that the "gutting" of cities is due largely to the "grand visions of politicians"--from both parties--with their grand visions of an ever-expanding network of highways, and also due to the "free people" who for generations figured that using those roads to escape cities was desirable.

Incidentally, you should also know better than to rely on Democrats to help cities. Decades of local urban "leadership" by the Democratic Party has led to the gutting of almost every American city.

The growth of cities was due to commerce among free people, and not the grand visions of politicians.

http://www.bikeradar.com/news/article/presidential-candidate-barack-obama-meets-with-bike-industry-17190

Nothing specific was mentioned in the article, but a Presidential candidate meeting with bicycle industry leaders has got to be a first.

It's a classic presidential candidacy speech with something for just about everyone to laud or applaud except John McCain and oil companies. The closest to a livable streets applause line is:

"Let’s re-commit federal dollars to strengthen mass transit and reform our tax code to give folks a reason to take the bus instead of driving to work."