Should The Government Prosecute Homeless Or "Insane" Lawbreakers?

Take the C Train (Please)
January 26, 2005; Page A16

As residents of New York City, we thought we'd seen everything. But this week the city learned that a Sunday fire at a major subway station will disrupt service on the C Train for -- we're still trying to wrap our heads around this -- at least several months, and perhaps as much as three to five years. The rest of the country should think of this as the perfect liberal storm.

It seems that a local homeless man caused the fire trying to keep warm. And the city is lucky that's all it was because -- this being a good, progressive town -- just about anybody is allowed to roam the subway tunnels during freezing weather, according to official police policy. In other words, compassion for the homeless, on whom taxpayers already spend millions annually to provide shelter, requires that the city grant largely unmonitored access to people who could just as easily be planning anthrax or poison gas attacks as looking to keep warm.

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani made some progress against aggressive panhandling and vagrants, but they've both been returning with a vengeance under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. A genuinely compassionate city -- or at least a Mayor seeking re-election this year -- would require that those refusing the city's many legitimate venues for help be institutionalized, not granted blind-eye acceptance of their "alternative lifestyle."

Meanwhile, only in Manhattan could a burned-out switching system take years to repair. Most cities pretending to be world class would have long ago replaced 1930s-era wiring, and that certainly would have been true of New York when Robert Moses ruled. But for decades New York has been quite literally mortgaging its future by taking on debt and putting off infrastructure upgrades in order to keep feeding its out-of-control public sector unions.

Mr. Giuliani also made a temporary dent here, but as politicians tend to do he left big bills to his successor. And rather than use events of September 11 to promote changes, Mayor Bloomberg has acquiesced to the big spending political culture. He's even proposing his own larger spending projects, such as a taxpayer-financed Manhattan stadium for the New York Jets. He has said New York is a "luxury good" for which people should happily pay higher taxes. Thanks, Mike.

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Readers interested in the history and cause of New York's descent should consult an essay by the Manhattan Institute's Edward J. McMahon and Cooper Union Professor Fred Siegel, which is excerpted in the current issue of the Public Interest magazine. The authors describe the city's core problem as its "distributional politics and entitlement culture" that tend to prosper "in settled, affluent places that combine large pockets of wealth with sufficient comparative advantages to create the illusion of economic invulnerability."

This political culture has created a public-sector workforce close to one-seventh the size of the entire federal government's -- or some 300,000 workers. Along with a like-minded state government in Albany also dominated by public-sector unions, this culture has fed a cycle of high tax rates that feed greater spending in the boom years, followed by bankruptcy, or close to it, when a slowdown hits.

The result is also visible outside our office windows in lower Manhattan, where we can see that Number 7 World Trade Center is going up nicely with private money and under private direction. Meanwhile, the square that held the Twin Towers -- and that requires government agreement in order to develop -- remains a snowy, inactive hole in the ground three years after September 11.

We hope Congress is paying attention to what it's getting for the $20-some billion check it wrote the city in the aftermath of 9/11. That's not to mention that the city has utterly failed to take advantage of the fact that Wall Street, its cash cow, was helped immensely by President Bush's dividend, capital gains and marginal rate tax cuts.

No one should expect even the C Train fiasco to cause New York to change; that won't happen until the local political class understands the problem that Messrs. MacMahon and Siegel describe. We do hope, however, that New York's woes will serve as a warning to other parts of the country in danger of succumbing to the same liberal political fate. Californians were descending into a similar mire a couple of years ago with a dysfunctional political class in Sacramento, but they were fortunate to have the initiative process that allowed them to elect an outsider like Arnold Schwarzenegger. New Yorkers are stuck waiting for the C Train.

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The Insanity Defense

Conviction overturned in Yates drowning case Return To Top

The Insanity Defense

Conviction overturned in Yates drowning case
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