So you're proposing we throw good money after bad?
The city failed. It it's not financially feasible to fix it so it is self-sustainable at a level of investment that can be paid back in a reasonable amount of time, relocating is a perfectly acceptable proposal.
People have every right to stay there if they can afford to do so, but if they are going to ask others for financial help bailing them out, it's not in the least bit unreasonable for those spending the money to do so to dictate how that money is spent. If the city has no hope of recovery, then saying the money can only be used for relocation is perfectly acceptable. What's not acceptable is expecting others to support your unsustainable city in perpetuity.
Money is nothing but abstracted power and there's no such thing as 'good money', only the ability to wield power. As such you're effectively saying that it's morally wrong to use power to keep people in a wrecked city that they did not wreck, because while it's their home they are not themselves powerful enough to merit having one.
The whole 'good money' thing is a neat exploit on Western civilization as it began with the Magna Carta (admittedly a bit of an out-of-date concept now!). It's the idea that if power is abstracted into money, all of a sudden it can't be questioned again. By contrast, being able to set societal expectations for ultimate power turned out to be, by definition, civilized.
Translating your statement gives us 'if people without power dare to ask others with all the power for help, it's not the least bit unreasonable for those with the power to have total control over how those people live and what they do. What's not acceptable is to help people who will always lack power, because that's just wrong'.
And while this has been tried over and over in history, again: Magna Carta. This touching idea that everything has to ultimately serve money, has got to go. Anyway it's only an abstraction papering over the simple reality that if you accumulate enough abstracted power, your whims are more unquestioned than those of Kings… because 'good money'.
I'm proposing we throw good money into basic human necessities instead of investing in weapons, and that our measures of success be linked to human health and wellbeing, not to level of absolute exploitation.
While I don't agree on our defense spending budget and I'd love for us to cut back, there are a few things worth pointing out.
1) money spent on defense is orthogonal to the argument being made. Your point is a good one, but it still doesn't refute the point that it's good money following bad money.
2) While I don't think it's the best industry that we could be investing in, many people see defense spending as investing in the American people. One of the chief exports of the US is war, defense and weaponry. Lots of countries our customers of the US and there are lots of towns and cities that would be economically hurt (to the point of dying like Flynt) depending on how our defense spending was cut.
Appreciate this moderate take. It's the cold hard truth of American capitalism, especially in places like Michigan, but it doesn't mean we can't wish for humane policies!
What does capitalism have to do with it? It's almost universally agreed that government choices were the ones at fault, and whether capitalist, socialist, whatever, cost vs. quality is still a factor.
The city failed. It it's not financially feasible to fix it so it is self-sustainable at a level of investment that can be paid back in a reasonable amount of time, relocating is a perfectly acceptable proposal.
People have every right to stay there if they can afford to do so, but if they are going to ask others for financial help bailing them out, it's not in the least bit unreasonable for those spending the money to do so to dictate how that money is spent. If the city has no hope of recovery, then saying the money can only be used for relocation is perfectly acceptable. What's not acceptable is expecting others to support your unsustainable city in perpetuity.