I Loathe L.A.

[Repost From Old Site]
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin (He's this old guy who was smarter than you.)
In Los Angeles, we live in a nanny state.  A place whose government generally makes decisions based on what they perceive to be the "common good" of their citizens.  This well-intentioned pattern has continued nearly unmarred for longer than I have been alive.  And as a result, Los Angeles is among the worst places to live in any first-world country on the planet.  Short of famine, war and plague, there's not a whole lot you could do to make this place worse.
The streets are falling apart.  Half of the buildings are too.  The water tastes like rusty pennies.  The ocean is filled with trash.  Some neighborhoods are so dangerous that you can literally catch a stray bullet just driving past them.  The streets are so overcome with homeless that you don't even notice them anymore, their world is like like a shadow-dimension occupying the same physical space as ours, but never intersecting. According to 2009 estimates, nearly 20% of the population of Los Angeles County is made up of illegal immigrants.  Violent crime is so ubiquitous that a former LAPD officer can go on a 10 day rampage leaving four people dead and hundres more scared out of their minds, and the day it's over, his story is already eclipsed by the next rash of killings.  Traffic is so bad that it can take upwards of two hours to drive less than ten miles, and the air is so polluted as a result of this that some days it's against the rules to light a fire in your fireplace.  This city has been rotting from the inside for so long it doesn't even make sense.
I am reminded of Plato's metaphor of the cave, where people are born into bondage and are able only to see shadows cast by unseen puppet masters, while outside the cave lies the world you and I know.  The people of the cave believe those shadows to be the world entire.  Los Angeles has become so immersed in its own filth, it seems to have forgotten that it's supposed to be a city, a community, a place where people can go to make their living.
I say all that, only so I can say this:
For some reason, the things this city spends it's energy on are things like banning plastic bags from grocery stores, outlawing soda in schools and making it illegal to smoke cigarettes in your car.  There are commercials on local TV telling me to go vegan.  Sure, sure, the fiscal state of the city is a major issue in the upcoming election.  Sure, corruption is an issue.  But those things are and always will be jammed up by political gridlock.  The plastic bag, soda and smoking bans are the type of thing this city achieves. These are the things people agree on.  Nobody can agree that we need better infrastructure, or that we need double the amount of highways that we have, or that we need some useful way to help the homeless help themselves.  Nobody agrees on that stuff, so nothing changes.
If this were Sim City, I'd delete this game and start a new one.
P.S.- To all the wonderful people I have met here, I hope you aren't mad that I just shit all over your city.  Problems and all, Los Angeles is, at some level, a place like any other, filled with all kinds of people, good and bad.  And if you've lived here long, I think you'd be hard pressed to disagree with what I've said.