Consider the fate of Detroit. It provides a preview of America’s socialist future (if Obama gets re-elected).

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

“Will the last one to leave please turn off the lights?” goes the old joke. In the socialist worker’s paradise that was the Motor City, nearly half the streetlights are broken and the city can’t afford to fix them.

Detroit, the buckle on the Rust Belt that as recently as the 1970s had 1.8 million people, now has only 713,000 in an area of 139 square miles.

It fell victim to one-party Democratic rule and labor unions that made its key industry — auto manufacturing — uncompetitive and financially unstable. Before there was Greece, there was General Motors.

Yes, that is what happened.

Now Detroit has announced plans to reorganize that could have come right out of Pyongyang.

As Bloomberg reports, some 40% of the city’s 88,000 streetlights are broken, and the city will try to “nudge” people into moving into a smaller, more compact area that can be better maintained.

Mayor Dave Bing proposes to decommission nearly half the city’s lights, including all those in alleys, two-thirds of those in declining neighborhoods and a third of those in more stable neighborhoods.

“You have to identify those neighborhoods where you want to concentrate your population,” said Chris Brown, Detroit’s chief operating officer. “We’re not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas.”

Aha! The phrase “concentrate your population” gives the game away.

This is not about economizing – since when do Democrats in power economize?

The Democrat-controlled City Council has found a pretext for implementing Agenda 21.

The UN’s Agenda 21 enjoins the concentrating of urban populations in “high density housing”.  See here and here.

So Detroit residents can continue to reside in sparsely populated unlit areas — or move where the government wants them to move. …

In 2008, Obama czar Cass Sunstein co-authored a book called “Nudge” in which he argued that people could be pushed by government action into behaving in ways or doing things they would not ordinarily do or accept. The consent of the governed or the will of the people was considered an anachronism.

The scary part is that Detroit is what President Obama wants to fundamentally transform America into, a place where wealth is redistributed, not created, and where government picks winners and losers in an economy in which we all ultimately lose.

For the evils of Agenda 21, see our posts: World Communist government begins, May 13, 2012; Blessed are the slimy, May 5, 2012; Beware “Agenda 21″, June 24, 2011; The once and new religion of earth-worship, October 27, 2011; Agenda 21: the “smart growth” conspiracy, November 21, 2011;Three eees for environmental equalizing economics, December 4, 2011; Prepare to be DICED, March 23, 2012.