Things are completely backwards in Seattle where the government is creating the problems and then demanding the private sector clean up the city’s mess.

In an illuminating segment sponsored by Future42, [un]Divided’s Brandi Kruse examined multiple examples of how the City of Seattle enforces one set of regulations on businesses, yet does not enforce the same set of rules on itself or on homeless camp residents.

Kruse interviewed a Georgetown neighborhood business owner who was targeted by city inspectors for allowing a small hedge to grow over a sidewalk. At the same time, the city was allowing a large garbage filled encampment to completely takeover the sidewalk down the road.

In an act that is similar to an organized crime shakedown of the neighborhood small businesses, the same Georgetown merchant was told he needed to obtain a permit and pay the city “rent” to place a ladder on the sidewalk to conduct maintenance work on his building. Then he was told he also had to pay to fix unrelated damage to the sidewalk. So the city has escaped responsibility for maintaining the sidewalk but still demands the “renter” to pay for repairs?

In the city’s Little Saigon neighborhood, near the high crime blocks around 12^th & South Jackson, small employers are being fined for not cleaning up the graffiti which is being spray painted onto their buildings on a daily basis. Kruse asks why doesn’t the city arrest the taggers or at least provide patrols to discourage illegal behavior. Or, as they are doing in Lynnwood, the city is working with businesses to remove graffiti.

Concluding his famous Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln said, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” As Kruse unfortunately reports, in Seattle it now seems to be  “government of the people, by the government, for the government, shall continue to become more powerful.”