Amerika

Diversity paradise Houston may well be the future of America. A large sprawling city, it expands into many districts and covers as much land as a small state. On paper, it is the future of the West. On the street, things are more ambiguous and in fact, more nuanced.

As the scientists never tire of reminding us, Houston is the most diverse part of America if not North America:

Report co-author Michael Emerson, a sociologist and co-director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice, attributed the growth in diversity to a 1965 shift in immigration laws, which changed the way visas were granted.

Before that change, immigration was dominated by people from Europe. Once the United States began granting equal numbers of visas to every country, immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa became dominant.

According to the analysis, the percentage of metropolitan area residents who are Anglo dropped to 40 percent by 2010, down from almost 58 percent in 1990.

So how is that working out? After all, as the heart of America’s oil industry, Houston has plenty of money. It can never go wrong because there is always going to be money in oil and gas, and the major companies in that industry are headquartered in Houston.

Except that under diversity, Houston is always broke and raising taxes:

However, the County’s public tax notices clearly show that for the increase for the average homeowner will be at least 15% and may be as high as 19%.

While this increase is jaw-dropping, it is made even more egregious because it comes on the heels of a nearly 12% increase last year, making the increase over the last two years 29.5%. These increases will result in the County and its related entities receiving nearly $900 million more in tax revenue than just two years ago.

To say this increase is unprecedented is a gross understatement. I suspect this is the largest two-year tax increase in the history of the State of Texas.

Where do those property taxes go? Texas is in the midst of a massive boom in building and renovating schools to accommodate the surge in illegals. When the number of people showing up to a public school doubles in size, you need to construct a new school, and it needs what the courts have mandated over many cases.

Your 1950s school was simple: a headmaster, a secretary, maybe a few other administrators, and teachers or coaches for every discipline. Maybe you had a school security officer, but most commonly not. Now? Now the courts say you need English as a second language, disciplinarians, psychologists, speech therapists, and so on.

Since the 1950s, the school has changed to the point where the administration wing outnumber the teachers. Schools now are basically giant daycare centers that offer free meals and counseling for the welfare-dependents who outnumber the normal people. This makes them massively expensive.

On top of that, cities are no longer planning for the future, only trying to shovel enough funds into the poverty to keep the cities stable. Consequently, they always need more tax money, and as cities grow, they squeeze a shrinking group for more money as it tries to keep the institutions and houses it grew up with intact under the onslaught.

We can see in this a microcosm of how humanity self-destructs. The creators forge something good out of the wilderness; then the makers show up to take advantage, but so do the takers. After all, look at all that wealth sitting there that someone forgot to guard. Eventually the takers outnumber the makers and the society collapses.

The same is true of Houston. Look at that giant pot of oil and gas wealth! Someone forgot to guard it. So not just South Americans and Central Americans but worse, Californians, have flooded into the place. They want jobs that require little thinking or follow-through, unlike what the creators did, which required diligent follow-through.

Ever wonder why every third world wasteland was once a promising society? They got inundated in takers. The same has happened to Houston, and this is why the electorate has become dominated by diversity tax vampires who will always crank up the rates:

Four members of the Houston City Council (Matinez, Castillio, Alcorn & Plummer) have proposed increasing the City’s tax rate by 5%. However, as with Harris County’s recent increase, the effect will be significantly higher for homeowners because the average value of homes in the City has gone up, at least according to the Harris County Appraisal District (HCAD).

I have not seen what the average home value increase for the City of Houston is yet but for Harris County it was 4.5%. So, assuming it is something in that range, the proposed 5% increase in the tax rate would result in the average taxpayer’s bill going up by something close to 10%. I’m guessing that most of you did not get a 10% raise last year.

What else can they do? They are not creators or makers; they are takers. Takers do not mind wasting their lives at jobs. They in fact enjoy doing so. They are diligent, sort of. If they are not told exactly what to do, it flies out of their heads.

This is different from the pioneers and farmers who build a society. They are all follow-through. If you do not hunt until you find food, you starve; if you do not fix your irrigation, you starve. But on a job? If you do something halfway and then forget about it, someone else will pick up the slack. Just keep showing up and you will get paid.

Humanity is toast until it finds a way to fix this cycle. Socialism subsidizes it, libertarianism tries to cut out the takers but favors makers not creators. Perhaps every generation we need to burn everything down and start anew. Or maybe we could just have aristocrats who sequester wealth and resist herd impulses.

In any case, Houston answers the question of “is diversity really our strength?” No, it is the strength of the bureaucracy, which seems to have enacted regulatory capture of our politicianss and media because it has the money. But as we see from the case of Houston, diversity is a path to civilizational suicide.

Tags: diversity, education, houston, libertarianism, public schools, socialism