L.A. Election Post-Mortems

How unfortunate it will be if the effete, naive philosophy expressed by people like Shearer infects Los Angeles with the same socioeconomic malaise that has damaged the reputation and credibility of our neighbor to the north, San Francisco.

Local residents, politicians and urban policy-makers who lack common sense and economic awareness and who favor intrusive, self-destructive simple-mindedness and overreaction will doom Los Angeles to the kind of inertia, backwardness and decline that only prissy populists, the down-and-out, and eccentrics can tolerate and appreciate.

Shearer and friends should realize that the prospect of this region becoming a future has-been of Western America is not improbable when its people ignore and toss aside the facts and figures of a competitive market place and world.

JEFF FISHER

Torrance