If current conditions are totally different than in the late-19th-century West, the public dereliction is arguably worse — Los Angeles isn’t a boomtown surrounded by vast ungoverned spaces and overrun by drunk cowboys in the warm months. It is a 21st-century city, with all the advantages of a lavishly funded, well-established, completely legitimate system of public order.
It is choosing, however, to create ungoverned places through its own decadence and ideologically driven folly. Or to put it in Old West terms, it is ignoring what Wyatt Earp, that most famous of American lawmen, knew.
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