Yale Law School student Amelia Rawls complains in the Post about the callousness of the high-achievers of her generation:

…[S]ometimes some of these students will denounce world hunger but be unfriendly to the homeless. They will debate environmental policy but never offer to take out the trash. They will believe vehemently in many causes but roll their eyes when reminded to be humble, to be generous and to “do what is right.”

Maybe they will gladly accept positions at prestigious universities that will continue their privileged positions in society. Will Ms. Rawls gladly accept a high salaried position upon graduation, a salary only possible by charging clients outrageous fees?

Nonetheless, her point is good.  Many people adopt fashionable causes with little sincere regard to those they claim to represent.  A recent Slate article discusses George Orwell’s complaint about England’s condescending Socialists:

[George] Orwell also rails against the condescension many on the left display toward those they profess to care most about. Describing a gathering of leftists in London, he says, “every person there, male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class superiority. If a real working man, a miner dirty from the pit, for instance, had suddenly walked into their midst, they would have been embarrassed, angry and disgusted; some, I should think, would have fled holding their noses.”

Grave hypocrisy of this sort is the result of the fair weather adoption of popular causes.  For instance, it may be all the rage to adopt environmentalism (accompanied by the obligatory complaints against the Bush Administration, and installation of CFLs), just so long as one doesn’t have to give up a spacious suburban home and personal cars.

Marc Fisher in the Post writes about an issue that has long interested me: why people live where they do. Different neighborhoods and jurisdiction provide different amenities that appeal to different people. Suburbs such as Montgomery and Fairfax Counties offer high-quality public schools, a feature especially appealing to middle-class families. Other neighborhoods offer proximity to bars and nightlife, a feature especially appealing to the young and single. Some jurisdictions have low crime rates, appealing to everyone, no doubt, but to different degrees. Others offer affordable housing, something becoming scarcer in DC and close-in suburbs.

Fisher concludes:

In the end, there is a bit of a city-suburb split. Many suburban residents love where they live but labor to pry open hours in which they can take advantage of what they’ve worked so hard to be near. City residents lose out on amenities such as libraries and recreation programs, and on essentials such as strong schools, but gain something some find equally precious: time.

Ask people who live and work in DC and you will find few of them complaining about spending too much time sitting in traffic.

The Examiner reports that D.C. Councilmen Jim Graham and Phil Mendelson have introduced a bill to levy a $25/month tax on employer-provided parking, labeling the tax the “Clean Air Act Compliance Fee”.

Though it is good force drivers to pay for their burden on the pubic infrastructure, their sullying of the air, and their use of taxpayer-subsidized oil, the bill does not accurately account for air pollution.

Image two commuting scenarios: a Prius driven one mile to work and an SUV driven thirty miles to work. Certainly the SUV puts a greater strain on the environment and infrastructure, but both vehicles will face the same parking tax. This is why I advocate increasing the gas tax, which is a better indicator of the burden people put on the roads and the environment. However, since the city cannot tax the gas of Virginians and Marylander who drive in, the parking tax is the next-best solution.

My only fear is that such a tax is yet another factor pushing business out to the suburbs. The suburbs, despite their horrendous traffic and lack of practical transit alternatives, offer cheaper office space, the perception of lower crime, and plenty of qualified workers.

John Edwards mounted his campaign on his message that there are two Americas: one for the rich (like him, I suppose) and one for everyone else. This rhetoric caught on especially on the left as he railed against the Bush tax cuts and the Administration’s perceived favoritism toward its corporate friends. Though the Left loves to accuse the Right of exacerbating class divides, the city of Washington, a stronghold of the Democratic Party, is itself riven by race and class more than any of Edwards’s wildest quasi-Marxist nightmares. The D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute co-authored a new report released today and found that the city, even while benefiting from a renaissance and real estate boom, is failing to solve issues of structural unemployment, thus leaving many poor and near-poor families behind in the boom.

Between 1998 and 2006, there was a 10 percent increase in the number of jobs in the District, the report says. But the employment rate among D.C. adults with only a high-school degree dropped, from 61 percent in 1999 to 51 percent in 2006.”We’ve got this huge irony of a city in the throes of enormous economic development . . . but the job growth is not going to District residents,” said Walter Smith, Appleseed’s executive director.

The D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute also issued a report four years ago revealing that the city had the largest income gap of any major U.S. city. The report, based on Census data, found that in 1999 the average income for the poorest fifth of households was a mere $6,126, while the average income for the wealthiest fifth of households was thirty times that amount, $186,830. How ironic that a stronghold of the Democratic Party is also an exemplar of John Edwards’s two Americas. What’s worse than the two Americas are the two Washingtons: one for the rich, white liberals who sport anti-Bush bumper stickers and send their children to private school, and one for everyone else shut out by lousy schools and an unresponsive city government.

In a heavily one-party city such as Washington, all constituencies are competing for the party’s attention. However, it is the powerful side of the Democratic Party that continues to hold sway. The city continues to push deals that benefit well-heeled Democratic interests, such as organized labor, to the detriment of minority-owned businesses, which are much less likely to be unionized and much less likely to have pricey lobbyists on staff. For building the new Nationals Stadium, the city required union labor in effect, though not in law, essentially negotiating a wealth-transfer scheme from small, minority-owned contractors to wealthy union bosses. The Post reports:

The [stadium labor] agreement does not require union workers. But it does demand that all workers be paid union rates and that they pay union dues while on the project — a major plus for organized labor. For the city, the pact held out the prize of good jobs for District residents

…..

Although the unions and city came away with potential benefits, the agreement drew the ire of nonunion contractors, who unsuccessfully tried to get Congress to intervene and block it.”It excludes us from the workplace,” said John Magnolia, who owns Joseph J. Magnolia Inc., a nonunion plumbing contractor with 400 employees that has been based in the District since the 1950s.

Supporters of the agreement, including union leaders, said there is nothing to prevent nonunion contractors from working on the ballpark. Many smaller subcontractors do not have union employees. But Magnolia said that he opposes forcing his employees to pay union dues in order for them to work on the ballpark. If those requirements were not there, he said it would have been much easier to reach the hiring goals for employing more city residents.

Thus Magnolia and his employees, in order to qualify to work on a project they are already funding through their taxes, must pay access fees to their competitor. Clearly unfair. The city council when . Unfortunately in a one-party city such as Washington, any call for fairness and equal opportunity will have to wait in line behind the demands of organized labor, which have trumped residents’ demands in other cases.