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Comment by agentofoblivion | Hacker News Reader

One question that’s always top of mind when I hear about the insanity of SF: why on Earth are people with radical, proven ineffective policies voted in time and time again? Whenever I hear from tech people, they think it’s crazy. So if tech has overrun SF, why haven’t the politics become more moderate? At least one of my assumptions must be wrong.

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Check out who tech companies and employee PACs almost exclusively donate their money to.

Read the many articles about steps tech companies and employees have taken to promote their own political causes and candidates while stifling opposition. How they had practically had to bring in grief counselors to soothe their tearful employees after their chosen candidate lost in 2016.

There's nothing moderate about it. They are getting exactly what they voted for, schemed for, and paid great amounts of money for.

Most people don’t understand economics and confuse cause and effect. Plus, emotional pleas have always had greater pull than rational ones.

They are also so polarized by the media they can’t even entertain practical solutions that existed for decades to centuries.

What is there in SF politics that you consider "radical"?

I mean, I can't disagree that the evidence supports the idea that recent policies there have been ineffective in addressing many of that city's most pressing issues. But "radical" ?

Are you being serious? SF is as much, or more, known for radical left wing politics than it is tech. They basically give homeless people free money, make it legally hard to clear camps, and don’t enforce laws of open, hard drug use and petty theft, leading to the obvious consequences. Basically they make it easy to be a drug addict on the street, and hard to be a police officer, and then wonder why crime and homelessness flourish.

I am being serious.

You're describing a highly proscribed area of city governance.

Radical left politics generally involves much larger issues, chiefly relating to economic and power relationships between different groups with a society. At least. What's going on in SF has essentially nothing to do with that at all.

They are one and the same. Chesa Boudine was largely responsible, and ran on the platform, of essentially not enforcing laws on drugs and theft. His parents spent decades in prison for murder as a result of their radical leftists activism with the Weather Underground. SF is basically the poster child for putting radical leftists in charge.

Getting rid of cash bail, trying children as children instead of adults, creating a unit to investigate wrongful conviction… these aren’t radical policies.

Boudin did enforce laws on drugs. Multiple drug dealers were prosecuted during his short watch. And overall violent crime fell during that period as well.

Boudin was recalled, despite no real evidence that his policies had significant impact on crime rates.

Our elections are driven by nonsense “left” “right” media hysteria and propaganda, not any sort of fact.

Really? So there isn’t open and pervasive drug use? All these videos of herds of people robbing stores, and homeless people straight up saying they can use/sell drugs and commit petty theft without consequence are just lying?

Well, Walgreens have certainly admitted they were almost certainly over-reacting last year to store robbery, and that the statistics are nowhere near as bad as they were claiming.

Can I assume that you're comfortable being equated with whatever your parents did during their younger years?

Look, radical leftist politics in SF (or anywhere else) would be about:

  1. corporate taxation
  2. minimum wage at $21/hr or above
  3. limiting investment in residential real estate
  4. major investment in public transit
  5. limiting the use of private motor vehicle transportation
  6. reducing the role of national/international brands in city-wide retail
  7. progressive (i.e. marginal) property taxation
  8. pushing CA on a number of issues, such as non-local tax base for education

The problem is that these policies, unlike the ones dealing with issues like homelessness, would conflict with the desires of the wealth & power classes, and thus cannot be enacted. So you're left with "radical" politics basically being about how the city deals with its poorest, most needy residents, without any fundamental change in the wealth & power relationships that would actually be genuinely radical.

Those were all hallmark left wing policies up to maybe the early 2000s but nowadays the policy programme is different. When was the last time you heard leftists talk about tax? It's like something from another time, these days it's all about other policies like racial/sexual divisions, control over media and education, "reparations" and so on.

> When was the last time you heard leftists talk about tax?

I don't live in SF, or the Bay Area or CA, so maybe the leftists you're referring to are people I don't hear much at all. But the leftists I do hear (e.g. Jacobin magazine) talk about taxes all the time. I heard Sanders talk about taxes while Schultz was in front of Congress last week.

I’m confused—you’re claiming the above are radical leftist policies? They seem like (mostly bad) moderate left policies to me.

Here are things I think are radical, and my gauge for that is asking if it could reasonably appear on a BLM demands list. Pushes to defund police, stop enforcing laws (or as Chesa did, enforce weakened versions for fear it would result in “dangerous” deportations) or direct repeat criminals to programs that allow them to avoid jail/records, giving homeless cash and a place to do drugs “safely”. Not to mention the new ask for $5M per black resident for reparations, with some claiming it doesn’t go near far enough.

The idea that these problems are a result of high cost of living and NIMBYism are absurd. When progressive policies fail, the left still find ways to blame it on “the rich”. Marxism 101.

Take away the “radical leftist” policy of not building housing for the past several decades and San Francisco’s problems are all solved.

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