Viewed through a broken factory window in the once-proud Motor City, old Long Beach–with fond memories of the Pike Amusement Park, and maybe even the Seventh Fleet; and with quite a bit fewer aerospace jobs than we once had–doesn’t look bad at all.

As Reason magazine writer and Long Beach native Matt Welch writes, at the mag’s website, “As the market for war making collapsed, the market for peaceful global trade exploded, turning the twin ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles into the largest commercial port complex in the Western Hemisphere. Commercial airplane manufacturing and shipbuilding gave way to warehousing and tourism.”

Really? People come here to not go swimming? Okay.

“A housing market that had looked so hopeless to homeowners was reheating by the second half of the decade,” Welch writes. (The Press-Telegram’s John Canalis seems to have spotted this piece first.) “And in arguably the most telling statistic about a city’s health, the population of Long Beach actually grew by 7.5 percent in the 1990s.”

Yeah–and now it’s slipping: we’ve fallen from the state’s fifth largest city to its sixth (pick us up on your way down, Fresno).

Welch ultimately uses Long Beach’s economic diversification to argue against what he calls “clustering employees to serve government tastes”–and you can see where he’s heading: into a broadside on government ownership of General Motors.

“With each step away from the customer and toward the government, the Big Three become less competitive and less likely to be sold off to profitable companies that might have some use for the legacy plants, workers, and brands,” Welch writes. “By ’saving’ the U.S. auto industry, Obama stands to lose a once-great city.”

Enjoy!

Tags: auto industry nationalization, California, detroit, fresno, General Motors, john canalis, Long Beach, Matt Welch, press telegram, Reason, Southern California, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas