"You've read the headlines, you've seen the tweets, now get close and personal to the Doom and Squalor of downtown San Francisco!"

That's the advertising hook for the city's newest walking tour, and it worked — tickets sold out, weeks in advance. The guide remains anonymous, and the big reveal is set for next Saturday, but what we do know is that he is a San Francisco native, a "political junkie," and a "card-carrying City Commissioner" and he's ready to pull back the curtain on the "policy choices that made America's wealthiest city the nation's innovative leader" in every civic crisis imaginable.

Also from the promotional teaser:

How can a city with a $14.6 billion annual budget be a model of urban decay? How can it spend $776.8 million per year on police and have no rule of law to show for it? How can it spend $690 million on homeless services and receive an official United Nations condemnation for its treatment of the homeless ("cruel and inhuman"; "violation of multiple human rights")?

The tour is an easy 1.5 miles, and participants will have a chance to see the "open-air drug markets, the abandoned tech offices, the outposts of the non-profit industrial complex, and the deserted department stores."

We might be tempted to immediately assume that the mystery tour guide is a conservative, given his sardonic stunt over the undeniable causality between leftism and societal rot, but I'm not so sure. In fact, if I had to guess, I'd wager that he is actually a leftist himself (a circumstantial speculation, of course).

First off, this man is evidently well versed in the "rules" of Saul Alinsky, given his strategy of ridicule, a tool that Alinksy touted as "man's most potent weapon."

Secondly, he writes this:

You will find no better expert. Your guide is an urban policy professional ... overseeing a municipal department with an annual budget over $500m. ... He has spent hundreds of hours on both sides of the government dais, shouting into the opposite abyss. (This event is the result of his own mental-health crisis.)

When he says he's an "urban policy professional," I can only assume he has some sort of academic background in the field; not typically (if ever) a route taken by principled conservatives. It's also safe to assume that this man has been in government a long time because a) it would be unusual for a wet-behind-the-ears college graduate to receive commissioned appointment with a half-a-billion-dollar budget, and b) how could anyone drive himself to the point of a "mental health crisis" over government being hopelessly incapable of solving social issues? The government's literal modus operandi is to leave everything it touches worse off. More intervention always equals more problems. Every conservative knows that!

The man in question almost reminds me of the highly distinguished Thomas Sowell, who at one point was a left-wing Marxist. As a young man, he saw gaping wealth disparities in Manhattan, and when he stumbled upon the writings of Karl Marx, Sowell said they "seemed to make sense."

But then...Sowell took a summer internship at the federal Department of Labor, and he quickly learned that "the government is not simply the personification of the general will," but rather, "the government institutions have their own institutional interests." Soon thereafter, Sowell abandoned Marxism and became a limited government conservative. His conversion story can be watched here:

Anyone who can work in government, see the problems with government firsthand, then "spend hundreds of hours" on a fool's errand like trying to get the government to be more efficient can only be a leftist.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.