Baltimore deserves the Third-World profile it has developed because it has expanses of crumbling, crime-riddled neighborhoods populated by low-income renters, an absent middle class, and just a few enclaves of high-income gentry near the Inner Harbor or in suburbs.
To the extent that city officials recognize the problem, they seem to confuse symptoms with the root cause of the economy's disease. For them, poverty, street crime or bad schools are the problem. Their solution is always more social spending and still-higher taxes...
How did this happen?
The city has waged a war on capital for more than 50 years, raising property taxes an astonishing 21 times from 1950 to 1985.... Politicians, in short, reason that because physical capital cannot typically be picked up and moved, it is immutable. Wrong. It depreciates. Fail to replenish or improve it, and it decays to uselessness.
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