Rep. Mike Krusee Still Working Tolls.

Letter to the Muckraker:

Sal,

Mike Krusee is at it again. For a Republican, he embodies, promotes and implements the most fundamental Stalinist governmental and societal programs.

Let us consider his latest Envision Central Texas preferred growth scenario. Although he is not old enough to have lived through it, he speaks of new Urbanism and the Booming Metropolis as an old idea. Indeed it is. Stalin promoted it, especially after World War II. In all major Russian, and all soviet-bloc nations, people live in urban densities and mixes of uses habitations. These consist of row after row of concentrated high-rise concrete boxes. Most Americans are too young to recall Pruitt-Igo, Cabrini Green, Bedford-Stuyvesant and similar stalags in most medium-to-large American cities. These were built by FDR's fellow-travelers based upon the Stalin model. Curious things happened on the road to utopia. Good Muscovites, although they loved their free Moscow housing and their free world-class public transportation, preferred their country dachas, and they still do. Automobile traffic jams trying to escape Moscow, Petersburg, Kiev, etc, weekends, put anything endured at the Oak Hill Y to the shame of inconsequence. Austinites and Muscovites permit their city free apartments to deteriorate without the least effort maintenance and crime flourishes in free housing like mushrooms in damp, dark manure.

I don't know where Mr. Krusee lives or where he vacations. I suspect that he is a richly-rewarded lobbyist, and that he will become more so as his post-legislative lobbying gigs pay off. Especially, I would like to know what his immediate and long-term payoffs from the transportation construction and toll-collecting industries might be. Travis County Commissioner Gerald Daugherty told me when I queried him on this point at a TXDOT meeting, "I don t have anything against a guy making a nickel, do you?" But that aside, I would ask Krusee: Why do you suppose people choose to live outside the city? Could it be that they prefer a rural to an urban lifestyle? Should they not have that choice? In the Soviet Union they did not. In modern Russia, not only the Mike Krusees of the regime have dachas, ordinary citizens do also. Could it be that despite the new Urbanism and the Booming Metropolis, Russians and Americans prefer rural living? Does Mr. Krusee wish to recreate Stalinism, or will he acknowledge that people may choose, and have the option, to dwell among the deer and correcaminos, rather than among the quaint characters who inhabit so many of Austin's streets.

Then there are the matters of Austin's taxes, the culture of liberal preciousness that afflicts all who are permitted to speak in Austin, and of course the ethnic divides that stubbornly refuse to submit to the concerted effort of our most committed social experimenters. A recent study of effects of enforced multiculturalism revealed that dwellers in enforced diverse neighborhoods tended to hunker down and to avoid social interaction, in other words, to defeat the original premise of optimistically enforced diversity. Mr. Krusee has perhaps not wanted to see that study or consider its conclusions. Good Progressives like Mr. Krusee, employ central planning to achieve what they pretend to be lofty goals but which, in fact, reward themselves with power and money. Regrettably, Krusee & Co. are not smart enough to recognize the unintended consequences of their grand, media-endorsed, tax-supported and governmentally-imposed utopian plans. Like Cabrini Green Public Housing and Kansas City forced busing to achieve racial mixing, whole projects collapse and it is back to the drawing board without penalty for malfeasance. Good Progressives like Mr. Krusee failed to learn that best choices are made by the combined efforts of all citizens in the market place. Too bad.

If Mr. Krusee is the best that Republican Party has to offer, we are indeed in deep trouble.

Bill Crowley