Opinion

De Blasio’s New Yorks

The latest news shows Bill de Blasio surging in the polls. What makes his rise interesting is that he is one of the few mayoral candidates with a clear message: We live in two New Yorks, he tells us — one for the haves, the other for the have-nots.

De Blasio calls this “A Tale of Two Cities,” and he gave his most expansive version of this at the New School in May. In it he concluded as follows:

“We don’t have to continue to live the Tale of Two Cities that confronts us today. There is a better way, and it’s within our reach. But to close that divide, to unite our city, to guarantee that New York is once again a city of opportunity for every resident in every borough from every walk of life . . . we need fearless, unflinching vision, political will and an ironclad commitment to change the path we’re on.”

We agree with every word. We’d just add that virtually every one of de Blasio’s “fixes” would in practice make the divide between the two New Yorks deeper.

De Blasio is the last of the big-time class warriors. And his solutions come out of the 1960s: Jack up taxes on the rich, increase spending and programs for the poor, award no-bid city contracts to women and minority-owned businesses and so forth.

What he doesn’t seem to realize is that the real divide is not so much between rich and poor but between the life you live when your needs are supplied by the free market and the life you have when you depend on government.

For example, while the former class lives in nice private housing, the latter are packed into government housing that is seldom maintained. While one class can choose a private school or move to an area with a good public school, moms and dads from the other New York see their children in failing public schools. And so on.

If you give people a choice between these two worlds, no one would willingly choose the world de Blasio offers. The answer to the two New Yorks is to expand opportunity, not government.