From New York to Detroit, Baltimore, and Portland

An engineer’s parable of a mill-creek village reveals why today’s city crises aren’t about greed or compassion—but a broken economic mechanism no one has bothered to inspect.

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The Village That Avoided Inspecting the Mill Creek Paddles

The creek never failed the village.

It came down from the hills fast and cold, fed by snowmelt and distant rains. Each season it carried new water, new labor, new hands willing to work. From the stone bridge, the current looked strong—stronger than it had been generations earlier.

And yet the mill produced less flour each year.

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A Wheel That Still Turns — Only Enough to Deceive

The paddle wheel still turned in the stream, darkened with age, moving just enough to reassure anyone passing by that the system still worked. No alarms sounded. No collapse was visible from a distance.

Up close, the failure would have been obvious.

One paddle had slipped loose from its setting and dragged uselessly through the water.
Another had split along the grain, spilling force instead of capturing it.
A third had rotted hollow—moving, but no longer transmitting torque to the shaft.
The shaft gearing itself had missing teeth, no longer meshing cleanly from wheel to grinder.

The stream surged past—energetic, but wasted.

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Surplus Masks Failure—Until It Doesn’t

Because the wheel still turned, though more slowly, no one bothered to inspect it. And because no one repaired it, the mill ground less and less grain.

At first, the decline was masked. Old grain sat in silos from better years. Surplus carried the village forward on yesterday’s productivity. But the silos filled faster than the mill could empty them. Grain sat too long. Damp crept in. Rot followed—along with rats.

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Scarcity Becomes Moral, Then Goes Political

The bakers noticed first. Less flour arrived, but demand grew. They raised prices—not out of greed, but arithmetic. They were accused anyway.

Thefts began. Shoplifting. A constable was hired. Then another. Then a squad. Taxes rose to pay law enforcement and to expand city hall, where arguments now replaced work.

Still no one looked at the paddle wheel that had worked reliably for a hundred years.

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Debating Fairness While Ignoring Basic Mechanics

Committees formed to debate fairness. Rules were written to control prices and allocate bread. Redistribution was proposed—taxing the rich to feed the poor. Outside the meeting hall, the creek rushed loudly past the windows, as if mocking the proceedings as political nonsense.

Then a new politician arrived—confident, eloquent, certain he understood the problem.

They elected him mayor because he seemed earnest and knowledgeable.

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Futile Policies That Presume the Wheel Still Works

He froze bread prices.
He capped rents at the inns.
He emptied the jail to show mercy to the destitute.
He declared bread a basic right to life—not the product of work.

The crowd cheered.

With prices frozen, bakers stopped baking. With repairs avoided, mill hands left. Those with means followed the creek downstream to places where paddle wheels were still inspected, maintained, and repaired.

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A Village Left Managing Gradual Decline

The wheel continued to fail.

The village was left with grain rotting in silos, laws multiplying on parchment, and guards patrolling scarcity in stores, hovels, and streets—beside a stream that never stopped flowing.

The tragedy was not that the water failed.

It was that no one would admit the wheel was broken.

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The Modern Parallel

New York City is that village right now.

The stream is not the problem. Immigrants still arrive with energy, labor, ambition, and ideas. Capital still circulates. Demand for housing and work remains intense. From a distance, the city looks vibrant—crowded sidewalks, constant motion, visible wealth.

But the paddle wheel is old and gradually breaking.

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When the System’s Mechanism Fails

Housing production is mechanically constrained by zoning, permitting delays, and litigation. Small businesses are burdened by compliance costs and arbitrary enforcement. Tax policy punishes what productivity remains. Institutions consume resources without restoring output. Departments grow bloated and fail to mesh. From afar, the gearing appears intact. Up close, the paddles are cracked, slipping, or rotted through.

Zohran Mamdani’s socialist policies miss this entirely.

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Substituting Moral Fixes for Mechanical Repair

Price freezes, rent controls, expanded entitlements, and moral claims about fairness all assume the wheel still turns efficiently—that production merely needs better sharing. They do not inspect the mechanism. They substitute moral accusation for mechanical diagnosis.

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Visible Consequences of an Unrepaired System

The consequences are visible now, not theoretical.

Homelessness spreads into parks and streets as the housing supply cannot respond. Looting rises as policing is defunded, enforcement collapses, and scarcity is normalized. Squalor hardens into permanence. Rats flourish where law and order retreat.

These are not signs of compassion carried too far. They are symptoms of a government no longer competent at converting flow into output. Mass deportation is what happens when local economic failures are amplified to the national stage.

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Rationing Scarcity Instead of Restoring Production

Freezing prices does not fix broken paddles.
Redistribution does not restore gearing torque.
Socialist charity without repair accelerates decline.

Those who can leave do. They follow the stream to places where paddle wheels are still maintained. Those who remain are governed by rules designed to ration scarcity that never should have existed.

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The Only Question That Matters

Leave it to a mechanical engineer to see the failure for what it is. Not a moral shortcoming. Not a shortage of water. Not a problem of good intent—but of a broken mechanism. A mechanic doesn’t argue about fairness when a vital machine fails; he inspects without prejudice and then fixes it fast at whatever the cost.

Ideology obscures the cause. Methodology reveals it.

Strip away the slogans and the question is simplly:

Why isn’t the city’s economic wheel turning efficiently?

Everything else is political posturing and socialist noise.