Extra, extra, read all about it. Not all New Yorkers have the same incomes! Not all have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams! And most — gasp! — don’t live on Park Avenue or have nannies and housekeepers!
If this doesn’t strike you as breathtaking news, then you didn’t drink the Kool-Aid and join Bill de Blasio’s movement. I say movement because de Blasio doesn’t just want to be mayor. He has discovered there is poverty in Gotham and many other pesky outcomes where some people do better than others. And he intends to end that disparity.
“Fighting inequality and fighting economic injustice,” as he put it, is what he’s all about.
Good luck with that, but before New Yorkers jump onto the Democrat’s bound-for-utopia bandwagon, some history is required. We could start with Karl Marx, but we’d just get lost trying to decode the incomprehensible differences among Marxists, Leninists and Trotskyites.
Instead, let’s look at Cuba, which, strictly by the numbers, reflects the paradise de Blasio describes. Fidel and Raul Castro had their way for 54 years and pulled off the socialist dream: The island nation had the least income inequality in the world, a survey found. North Korea also was off the charts.
Of course, there are some peculiar facts about Cuban exceptionalism. Everybody is equally poor, with average monthly wages of $19, while children’s shoes can cost nearly as much.
And that much-ballyhooed health-care system? It’s a joke. Bring your own sheets, bedpans and food to the hospital, and pray you don’t die of infections or neglect. True, it is free, so your family won’t get stuck with a capitalist-size bill to bury you. What a relief that must be.
On my visit to Cuba, I was struck by the total breakdown of everything except the police state. Havana’s once-glorious architecture is crumbling, and there are chickens and pigs, but no running water, in large parts of the central city.
Half the cars are owned by the government, and the other half belong in antique shops. Smaller cities look as though they are stuck in the 19th century, with public transportation consisting of a man guiding a horse-drawn wagon. TV and Internet are scarce and tightly controlled. Complaining about any of this can land you behind bars.
I’m not suggesting de Blasio could take New York back that far, at least not in one term. But his rhetoric about a “tale of two cities” and his repeated promises to use City Hall’s power to erase inequality mean we would be fools not to take him seriously. As Barack Obama is proving on a national scale, a charismatic, ambitious ideologue with no understanding of economics can do a lot of damage in a short time.
Even more troubling, de Blasio is not alone. Council Member Letitia James, one of two candidates left in the race to succeed him as public advocate, blasted Mayor Bloomberg Friday for saying it would be a “godsend” if “we could get every billionaire around the world to move here.”
James accused Bloomberg of favoring “the wealthy and the well connected” and committed herself to the fight to “reduce the gap between the rich and the poor.”
Hers is a common mistake on the left. The obvious resentment she has about other people’s money leads her to assume that success and failure alike depend on government, and that the poor would be rich if only the government helped them more. If you believe that, it follows that bureaucrats should aim to level the results.
Sooner and later, more socialism means more human misery. But true believers never grasp the basic fact that, if you penalize success, there won’t be any. Remove the consequences of failure and there will be more of it.
Naturally, utopia will be led by elites who know what’s best for everyone else. Whether in Cuba, North Korea or Washington, the mandarins will be cosseted by comforts taken from others.
People who know de Blasio well say he is smart, just as many say Obama is smart. But smart is as smart does, and we ought to save the word for those who can help make the economic pie bigger instead of just trying to re-divide the pie we have. That would be the smart thing to do if you wanted all New Yorkers to prosper.
O’s Syria deal is a nuclear disaster
Here’s a happy thought — the deal on Syrian chemical weapons is a “dry run” for a deal on Iranian nukes.
Happy, that is, for Iran’s thugocracy. For the rest of the world, it is shaping up as a disaster.
The idea that the hollow “solution” to the Syrian problem is a template for White House goals with Iran rings frighteningly true, given how quickly President Obama dropped his red-line threats. There is not a snowball’s chance in hell that Bashar al-Assad will keep his promises to turn over his sarin stockpiles, nor is there any hope Russia will force him to. He is already getting wishy-washy about the terms and holding out his hand for American cash.
Even with that ominous start, the talk is growing that Obama quickly pivoted to Iran in hopes that Russia would help him pull off another Houdini escape from responsibility. The president is corresponding with Iran’s new president and is almost certain to meet him when both are at the United Nations this week.
The problem is that the “peace at any price” approach always raises the price later. Syria and Iran are not likely to give up their weapons of mass destruction, especially with Vladimir Putin protecting them.
His embrace shields both from the Security Council and American military action. Even Israel will find it impossible to use force against Iran’s nukes while Putin has lured a desperate Obama into endless negotiations.
Oh, for the good old days. That would be three weeks ago, when the White House was calling Assad “Hitler” and vowing to punish him for war crimes. Now we are his partner and eager to make the same deal with Iran.
Only in America, only under Obama.
High cost of firm’s bad ‘checks’
The private company that performed the background checks on surveillance contractor Edward Snowden also did the checks on Aaron Alexis, the military contractor who carried out the massacre at the Washington Navy Yard.
In both cases, the firm, USIS, turned its investigations over to government officials, who then approved the security clearances.
Given that there are about 5 million people with various security credentials, what are the chances that these two were the only traitors and mentally ill psychopaths among them?
Zero.
We beg to differ, Weiner
Proving he’s learned nothing, Anthony Weiner said on a radio show that “I’m not an idiot.”
Actually, we had an election on that, and voters clearly believe he is an idiot.
So be a good boy and go away.