Angry New Yorker |
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Semi-Daily Rants from New York City's Angry Man
"As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly."
- Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Life of Johnson, Sept. 1783
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Thursday, November 16, 2023
We recently returned from two weeks in Europe, visiting our ancestral homeland of what is now Croatia. It was the first long vacation we'd had in 3+ years, and much needed, but the history of the area my family hales from reads like a fictional story of armies, empires, fiefdoms, short-lived republics and sieges. Game of Thrones had nothing on actual reality - minus the dragon, of course. The powers that ruled over coastal regions of what is now Croatia proper are legion. From the Roman Empire, to the Venetian Republic - which gets virtually no coverage in historical works despite having existed for 1100 years from AD 697 until AD 1797 during which it held hegemony over much of the Adriatic - to the French, to the Austro-Hungarian Empire ending in 1918, then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, to Italian control, interspersed with short-lived, self-proclaimed republics (in Trieste, Labin and elsewhere), and consolidation post WWII as Yugoslavia (literally "Land of the South Slavs "), and ultimately to self-sovereignty post 1992 until today. Had the communists not taken over in the aftermatch of WWII I'm not sure my family would have emigrated to the US. Maybe they would have, since my paternal grandfather had long worked in the US proper and on cross-Atlantic ships including on the Titantic's rescue ship, the Carpathia; but maybe they wouldn't have. That's a topic for an alternative universe. But the fall of the iron curtain sealed the deal regardless. It'd been 15 years since I last visited. And the change is stark. And not bad overall - at least on the surface. [And speaking of Game of Thrones, above, Dubrovnik was the city where they filmed much of the King's Landing scenes and watching it I could point out what was real and was layered in CGI.]  First, Croatia hasn't been capsized by immigration the way the western EU countries have. The immigrant waves have centered west - on Italy, Germany, France and the UK. To the east and north Poland and Hungary have closed off massive immigration. And no immigrant wants to take their chances in Bosnia or Montenegro, let alone Serbia or Albania (and 10% of Albania has picked up and moved to the UK in the last few years). Second, Croatia's diaspora is well-connected to the homeland, though that link attenuates with each passing year. I've never lived in Croatia, but I feel a connection to it, and Istria in Croatia, given the many years of stories I've heard from my father and mother. I feel the lifes lived there and still have relatives that I know living there. I'm hoping we can return again soon, and given I can work from anywhere I wouldn't mind seeing if I can live there all summer next year - though I'm not sure what I'd do with my bees. I think it'd be tough stuffing the hives in the overhead luggage compartment on the plane. And, of course, I'd have to leave my firearms behind, too. We'll see.... Monday, September 19, 2022
"No plan survives contact with the enemy" - German field marshal Moltke the Elder. Call this morning out of the blue from a NYC real estate agent asking about "my plans" for the building in Astoria, NY, that my grandfather purchased back in the early 1950s. Built in 1928, it's an attached two story brick row-house with a number of small apartments. It's where I live as a kid for the first few years of my life; it's where I spent many a Sunday as my parents and family visited with my maternal grandparents (my father's parents live around the corner) and where me and a good friend fresh out-of-college stayed for one winter because it cut our commute to our downtown Manhattan job while my grandparents headed south to their trailer in Astor, FL. It's where my grandparents basically lived their entire adult lives after they came to the US after WWII. Comparables on the block now go for $2.2 to $3.1MM. I have no idea how the agent got my name. I'm not listed on any of the deed documents to my knowledge; nor on the family trust agreement that the building's title was transferred into before my grandmother's passing. [I'll come back to this later.] I've been thinking a good deal about leadership. Especially from our current political leaders, of both parties. And I've come to a conclusion that most of our current crop of lifetime leaders are sadly wanting because they have virtually zero idea of how chaos effects reality. Recently - and as totally an aside to this essay - I read U.S. Grant's memoir. As expected, a majority is highly focused on the Civil War. But the driving experience one gets from his recounting of warfare is chaos. Careful plans gone awry. Unexpected weather intervening. Needed supplies never showing up. Communications never received. Along the ability to react to same in an effective manner to overcome. Grant knew this first hand. This also factored into his Presidency. There's a reason the Marine's mantra is "Improvise. Adapt. Overcome" because nothing is more chaotic than the battlefield. Our leaders forget that chaos isn't confined to the battlefield. My grandparents knew chaos post WWII firsthand. My parents saw the effects of it firsthand. I only came to appreciate chaos' awesome power late in life - and I grew up reading WWII books like Guadacanal Diary, Thirty Second Over Tokyo, etc. where nothing in the recounting of war tales worked the way they were suppose to. But I didn't have an appreciation for this when it comes to policy. Mainly because I bought into the canard that adults were in charge and could be relied upon. Which has been patently proven to be in false. And I'm very sure today's millenials and the majority of today's well-bred children have little idea of the power of "things going sideways" - playdates are planned, schedules are made, and resume internship and add-ons are checked off - but it's a major factor in how we've gotten to where we are today. Why? Because our leaders invariably set up programs that are geared to predictable lock steps: Pass law A, People will do B and Result C is what will happen. But that's not reality. It's not the way life works. And going against reality generates bad results. [I'll return to this later, too] Bottomline is that very few in in congress or in the higher echelons of business knows what a real FUBAR day looks like or what Murphy's Law actually means in the court of the day. And for good reason: they arrange their days to avoid such scenarios. But the result is that have little understanding of what many, if not the majority, of Americans face each day. The morning where the car breaks down, the phone battery went dead, and the electric bill didn't get paid in time.... those unanticipated situations that veer the car of your day off the road and into a pole. Andromeda Strain had a scene where a small piece of piece got stuck in the teletype machine and prevented the bell from ringing so the person on duty never new a vital new message had arrived. It was classic Murphy's Law. Our putative leaders have forgotten this - or never realized it in the first place. Wednesday, August 11, 2021
So, Andrew Cuomo is out as governor. He's been an uber hack his entire career so we're very glad he's gone. Cuomo is one (of the thousand) of reasons we left NYC and NYS. His dismissiveness, arrogance, bullying, bluster, bombast, braggadocio (yes, alliteration is a thing) and open failings were there for all who were willing to see, even during the pathetic "Cuomosexual" adoration stage many of the weak-minded fell for last year. But his departure only highlights the corrupt nature of NY politics - the "three men in a room" control over the state and the Albany inbreeding of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours [and damned the consequences for the people of NYS]". The past two decades of NY politics has seen a string of governors forced to resign or otherwise made moot, with legislative leaders jailed, and with each new Attorney General (including Cuomo) riding rough-shod over the law. It has to stop. Spitzer. Schneiderman. Skelos. Smith. Silver. Bruno. Cuomo. Corrupt entitled losers all. We're no babes in the woods thinking there was a Golden Era of NY Governance. Look through NYS' history and it's replete with dirty deals, pay offs, crime and misbegotten leadership. The only saving grace is that we could always point to New Jersey and say, "You think we're bad? Yea, we are, but at least we're not as bad as New Jersey!" (And that's saying a lot as NJ had, by all measures, the most corrupt government from top to bottom of any New England state for at least the last 100 years.) The big question is: Can NY be saved? And by saved we mean restored to a state where people and their children are willing to continue to live here, grow here and die here. New York was built into a powerhouse by location, history and leadership, but it's been coasting on reputation and inertia for a long time. Coasting doesn't work in an era of the internet and seismic social shift and we're in such an era now. I would always kid friends I visited around the country that when I visited them I felt like how I imagined an East German must have felt when he escaped from behind the Iron Curtain and saw the West in full focus: I couldn't imagine how much was available and at how low a price. NYC warps you. Some of the warp can be positive. But much is negative. Because you start to believe that "this is how life is. And this is how life will always and should be. Because how else could it be?" For the record NYC isn't NYS. In many ways it isn't even in the US anymore. But before you take umbrage, think about it. In many ways NYC is a city from a different world. E.B. White celebrated it. Even while living on a farm in Maine. How much is there to celebrate now? We have family and friends still in NYC. But we would not move back after seeing what's available elsewhere. Living on bravado may be great for words on a t-shirt, but it doesn't work long term. And that's why we're the AngryNyker. Because it didn't have to be this way. And damn it, as a native born New Yorker, it shouldn't have been. Labels: Corruption, Covid, Cuomo, NYC Thursday, January 21, 2021
Day one. The amount of glee, fist pumping and self-congratulatory semaphoring on display yesterday was interesting to watch, but dismaying to behold, as if somehow an empty inauguration in an armed camp was worthy of unbridled celebration. President Biden (a/k/a "The Husk") bleated out "unity" many times yesterday, but in essence his speech in its entirety called in reality for "conformity" not unity. The failing and overreach of the Democrats (a party to which we once belonged) have been covered to exhaustion elsewhere, but Biden - surrounded by his Obama-era retreads - instantly demonstrated what his "unity" would mean: eleven Executive Orders signed within minutes reversing President Trumps executive orders likewise reversing Obama's. Tit-for-tat is the modus operandi going forward, And so Biden, with his empty lofty words, his empty Washington, D.C., and his empty ideas will over the next four years give proof to H.L. Mencken's famous quip: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." We're going to get it good and hard. Thursday, July 09, 2020
If I call a watermelon a cucumber can I legitimately then say, "no, no, I didn't really MEAN watermelon. I meant any green skinned fruit/vegetable. How could you not KNOW that?" That's the thing about vocabulary. Words actually MEAN something. We even create entire books with nothing but words in them recounting what the word means. We call them dictionaries. But in recent years various segments have gone full 1984 Newspeak in redefining and backdefining terms, applying words where they don't fit and alway, always looking for "dog whistles" to call out. The thing about dog whistles ... if you can hear them YOU are the dog. Such convolution has its all too predictable end result in the BLM movement (where if you dare to say ALL lives matter or even ALL black lives matter you're somehow an irredeemable racist on par with the vilest pedofile). And so now we come the squirrelly Defund the Police crowd, who a few minutes after their mantra went up the flag-pole starting saying "but, but we didn't mean DEFUND, we meant take that money and give it to social workers and education who will take over for the police in areas."  Now look, I'm no fan of militarized police or a whole range of practices in law enforcement ranging from absolute immunity to no-knock warrants to prosecutors who overcharge (I believe many power-mad prosecutors should be disbarred for their misconduct, but they virtually never, ever are... that's a topic for another post), but to think we can have a calm, peaceful, civil society with millions in close proximity without a duly empowered element that keeps order is foolish. Also overlookeded is that the police exist as much to safeguard the "accused" as they exist collectively to protect the populace. The alternative is a descent into rough mob justice, lack of due-process and ultimately a vigalente-vendetta environment.Which brings me back to the start of this: the result of poor word choice ends in a breakdown of communication. As a kid I remember reading the story in Genesis about the Tower of Babel and thinking at the time - "Wow, that was messed up." But there was an immediate consequence to being unable to communicate - chaos. The nomenclature today pats themselves on the back for their clever burpings, but as in the biblical tale the only end result will be chaos and a dispersal to the four winds of our civilization. Wednesday, July 01, 2020
Well 2020... what can you say? I'm sure we'd all like a do-over to reset the clock back to 1/1/2020. But there's been so much to be "angry" about ongoing in NY it's hard to know where to start... so we'll start with something outside of NY. Namely, the growing rise to "ban" people from social media for hate speech. The other day Reddit banned President Trump on the basis of violating their ToS prohibiting "hate speech". We disagree completely. Or rather we agree 100% - so long as we get to decide what hate speech is... :) That's the general position, really, isn't it? I'm in favor... so long as I can control it. I think there’s justifiable reason for concern. It used to be that preferred counter to speech one didn’t like was to encourage more speech in the “marketplace of ideas” but social media has turned the marketplace of ideas into an MMC fighting octagon where two men enter and one man leaves. We understand such entities as private operations can set their own policies, but “hate speech” has no Constitutional foundation. There is no such thing under First Amendment jurisprudence and the govt can’t ban “hate speech” - http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/07/no-theres-no-hate-speech-exception-to-the-first-amendment/ As a thought experiment if some other social media outlet said they were going to ban people who posted – purely for argument’s sake – Black Lives Matter-related posts (on the hook that such groups have been involved in toppling statutes) because it fell under their specific definition of “hate speech” what would the reaction be and who is in a position to say their definition of hate speech is wrong, regardless of whether one agreed or not? They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Many are urging us to take the onramp. Monday, July 22, 2019
Well, it's been a good while since we've checked in here.... believe me there are good reasons. But in the time NYC has gone sideways in many ways... as short-sighted as we believe Bloomberg was in his hell-bent nanny-state at all costs world view (large sodas anyone?) our current Mayor sets the bar and highlights the caustic dead-on accuracy of the Bloomberg Syndrome, which notes that: "the next time your elected local or state official holds a press conference about global warming, the Middle East, or the national political climate, expect to experience poor county law enforcement, bad municipal services, or regional insolvency." We've had power outages, the increased incoherence of the City Council... (we still have a city council?) and the continued cruise control operation of many city agencies, with the MTA on autopilot, the blind continued push to turn all of Manhattan into a pedestrian and bicycle-clogged environ, and well... For 15+ years we've noted that the NYC DOT needs to be cleaned out. It's leadership seems to have never encountered a road restriction it doesn't like or a intersection where it won't slap up a traffic light because... well because. In our neighborhood the number of added traffic lights in the last 15 years have mushroomed. Were we not able to drive safely beforehand? Anyway, lest we get too far into the weeds it's good to be back... Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Angry New Yorker is coming back... because there's no shortage of things in today's NY to be angry about. Stay tuned! Saturday, January 08, 2011
It's rather stunning that we're already one week finished with 2011, leaving only 51 in which to fight the unholy troika juggernaut of ennui, inertia and politicians' inclination to spend more as an "investment" in the future. 2010 was, I'll be blunt, the worst year, personally, since 2001 - and that's actually really saying something. But in 2011 I'm somewhat (that's a tentative and qualified 'somewhat') hopeful, because I think more and more people are waking up to the collective cataclysmic dangers facing us. The flipside, however, is whether this awakening is challenged into focused productive action or merely becomes a fatalistic impulse to stir up a new martini, pull up a deck chair and listen to the band run through its final chorus of Near, My God, To Thee, before the deck tilts, the stern rises and the waters ultimately close again. Tuesday, May 04, 2010
Bloomberg Beclowns Himself I've long thought that the only reason anyone voted for Michael Bloomberg is that the alternatives were so much worse. Time again he's proven to be a big-spending, nanny statist with virtually no understanding of how the average family lives in the non-Manhattan boros of NYC. Yesterday he highlighted his clownish, yet again, stating without any evidence, without any factual basis, and without any knowledge that the Time Square failed bomber was likely “Homegrown, or maybe a mentally deranged person, or somebody with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something.” Doesn't like the health care bill??!? Surely, if these were the Mayor's top three and best guesses of NYC's mayor he has beclowned himself on an entirely different level than he has before. Why do so many politicians feel the need to spout on topics that they have literally no knowledge of? Wednesday, October 28, 2009
NY 23 What to say about the debacle upstate in the 23rd Congressional district. Suffice to say, Mr. Hoffman has our nod, for what little it's worth. Newt Gingrich is blowing a hole below the waterline in his ship of self with his endorsement of Dede Scozzafava. As Richard Brookhiser notes, the "contest in NY 23 is what the New York Conservative Party was made for." As Mark Steyn quips, Dede Scozzafava "isn't RINO but DIABLO - Democrat In All But Label Only. It's not one of those "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" bi-swinger deals — not when you're pro-'stimulus', pro-cash-for-clunkers." Enough is enough. A Must Read:
No shortage of bad and expensive ideas. Our country is in the best of hands. I can tell you this is they try to impose this where we live civil disobedience shall be the order of the day: Feds to Convince DC Area Taxpayers to Embrace $4.8 Billion Mileage Tax Wednesday, September 30, 2009
What next? Stalin's Birthday? Has the moral decay set in this deeply? We would have thought it impossible, but alas we are often chagrined at our naivite when it comes to the depths. From National Review Online:
You can drop a comment to the people owning/running the Empire State Building here - http://www.empirestatebuilding.com Labels: Empire State Building, jawdroppers Wednesday, September 09, 2009
We should be ruled like China. At least according to Tom Friedman. I get royally tired of beating the Tom Friedman piniata but the guy demonstrates cultural and historical blind spots the size of a red giant star. I'd be embarrassed to showcase such blinding ignorance. Yet, he no doubt considers himself rational, reasoned and supremely educated. He is none of these, and is in fact, wait for it, a "liberal fascist" who deserves no audience for his fervid mutterings larger than that of his own wide-eyed visage in the bathroom mirror each morning. I've said it before, but I have to remind myself of it constantly: Be extremely wary of those who want to "save" something, or do putatively "good" things for one group or another unless they either have a direct and immediate dog in the fight or are following their well-understood & established religious tenets because otherwise there is always a hidden agenda at work. But in some cases there is no longer even an attempt to hide the subcurrent agenda.To whit today's firestorm regarding Friedman's column, One-Party Democracy, in today's NY Times here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html?_r=1 While our current system is substantially broken (repealing the 17th Amendment and getting rid of partisan gerrymandering would go a long way toward fixing our federal systemic woes), no less a luminary than founder and 4th president James Madison, often called "the father of the Constitution", wrote in Federalist 10: “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.” Or, in more up-to-date terms ala Churchill, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones that have been tried." Friedman's column yearns for snuffing out of "factions" - that is interest groups - in the interest of furthering his goals. But if tried it would, as Madison noted, extinguish liberty. We should all be very wary of Tom Friedman and like-minded minions. The Firm Hand of the Benign Strongman [Mark Steyn] The New York Times's Thomas Friedman finally gets to where he's been wanting to go all these years. Everything would be so much better if we could just submit to the benign rule of an enlightened elite:
 Thomas Friedman is a Liberal Fascist [Jonah Goldberg] Mark beat me to it, but I must put in my two cents. Thomas Friedman writes:
So there you have it. If only America could drop its inefficient and antiquated system, designed in the age before globalization and modernity and, most damning of all, before the lantern of Thomas Friedman's intellect illuminated the land. If only enlightened experts could do the hard and necessary things that the new age requires, if only we could rely on these planners to set the ship of state right. Now, of course, there are "drawbacks" to such a system: crushing of dissidents with tanks, state control of reproduction, government control of the press and the internet. Omelets and broken eggs, as they say. More to the point, Friedman insists, these "drawbacks" pale in comparison to the system we have today here in America. I cannot begin to tell you how this is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s. It is exactly the argument that was made in defense of Stalin and Lenin before him (it's the argument that idiotic, dictator-envying leftists make in defense of Castro and Chavez today). It was the argument made by George Bernard Shaw who yearned for a strong progressive autocracy under a Mussolini, a Hitler or a Stalin (he wasn't picky in this regard). This is the argument for an "economic dictatorship" pushed by Stuart Chase and the New Dealers. It's the dream of Herbert Croly and a great many of the Progressives. I have no idea why I still have the capacity to be shocked by such things. A few years ago, during the worst part of the Iraq war, I wrote a column saying that Iraq needed a Pinochet type to bring order to Iraq and help develop democratic and liberal institutions. To this day, I get vicious hate mail from liberal and leftist readers for my "pro-dictator" stance. Meanwhile, Thomas Friedman, golden boy of the NYT op-ed page, is writing love-letters to dictatorships because they have the foresight to invest in electric batteries and waterless toilets or something. It looks like there's reason to hope I was wrong about Iraq (I certainly hope I was). But at least I favored a dictatorship of sorts — for another country! — because I thought it would lead to a liberal democracy. Here, Friedman lives in a liberal democracy but has his nose pressed up against the candy store window of a cruel, undemocratic, regime and all he can do is drool over the prospect of having the same power here. It's disgusting. Update: A friend IM's:
More on Friedman's Enlightened Despots [Jonah Goldberg] Dan Blumenthal at the EB:
This reminds me. I'm not a great student of what's going on in China, and I don't have its enlightened rulers on speed dial the way Friedman does. But I just find the idea that China is a great environmental steward absurd beyond ken (or barbie). China chokes the planet with more industrial smog than we do. Whole cities exist in perpetual dusk. China's factories are constantly sneaking lead and other poisons into their — and our — food and toys. The country is turning into a desert at a terrifying pace because of their land and water policies. Lord knows what horrors the Chinese are keeping off the books. I simply do not believe Tom Friedman et al when they say that China is beating us on the environment. No totalitarian regime has ever been a better steward of the environment than an advanced industrialized democratic regime. I have a hard time believing the Chinese are an exception to that rule. Update: Kenneth Anderson via Volokh.com calls Friedman's column "monstrous". (h/t NRO) Kenneth Anderson at Volokh:
Update: More from Will Collier. Thursday, August 13, 2009
New York's former and disgraced governor, Eliot Spitzer, is today a columnist at Slate.com, the webzine founded by Michael Kinsley and funded by Microsoft. In an era where the concept of personal shame has evaporated Spitzer is trying to rehabilitate his shredded reputation. A few months back in April, we apologize for not spotting this sooner, Spitzer co-authored an editorial entitled "Gun Control Without Gun Laws: How Obama can use government procurement regulations to limit gun violence" available here. It's worth a read if only to ponder that Eliot Spitzer is an object lesson: sometimes the universe does give people the justice they deserve. Why anyone still listens to this fool of unbridled chutzpah, arrogance and self aggrandizement is beyond us? Here he is on how the government can blithely still accomplish gun control without those pesky little things called "laws." We've yet to see a more telling example of raw unbridled power than his statement below that: "more fundamentally, companies could be told to stop selling certain types of weapons to the general public... * * * If government cannot legislate the conduct it wants, then it can use market power to buy it. For the money we are spending, we should buy not only guns but some peace from gun violence."Oh? For the children, right? Under what actual legitimate authority, you know "derived from the consent of the governed", are you talking about here Mr. Spitzer? Or do mean the same type of authority that you exercised to get your hooker to take the train down to DC for you? Here's the thing, Spitzer: If govt cannot legitimately legislate in an area it is overreaching its rightful confines if it works consciously to reach the same result through other means. (Which is why so many lawyers and constitutional scholars, like me, have very very deep seated problems with the constitutionality of federal tax and spending coercion on the states - thank you oh soooo much Supreme Court for South Dakota v. Dole (which was also a case "for the children"). ) Spitzer is also wrong on the facts. Drug dealers didn't "pioneer[] the use of 9-mm guns" the government did as part of switching from the long standard .45 over to 9mm pistols in order to use the same ammo as Nato forces. And Spitzer calls for magazine safety disconnects... maybe he should talk to those self-same police and military folks whose buying power he wants to harness... none of the guns they buy have them (for good reason too long to go into here). And witness first hand the oft derided but very real slippery slope in action: "If we can use a capital infusion to a bank as an opportunity to control executive compensation and to limit use of private planes, why can't the government use its weight as the largest purchaser of guns from major manufacturers to reward companies that work to keep their products out of criminals' hands?"Why not indeed? Government. Weight. Largest. Behold the truism in action: a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have. Finally, let's flip one of Spitzer's final sentences around and apply it to the govt in the way he applies it to private gun manufacturers. Spitzer quips: "This prompts a simple question: Why do we buy guns from companies that permit their products to be sold to bad guys?"To which our retort simple question is: "Why do we trust any government that permits its officials to constantly lie to citizens, confiscate ever increasing amounts of hard earned wealth, bankrupt them, their children and their grandchildren yet is allowed to continue to peddle old discredited ideas as if they were bound to work this time around?" Labels: gun control, Spitzer, Supreme Court Monday, July 06, 2009
CityJournal's Steven Malanga is digging again in NYC and NYS finances noting: "Over Bloomberg’s tenure, the city has, thanks to annual spending increases, Remember this when "Mayor Mike" starts blustering about cost-cutting and his fiscal responsibility - neither of which are true in any meaningful fashion. Malanga's full article is here: The City’s Finances: Budget-Cutting Made Simple Frederic U. Dicker finally gives up on NY. And he was one of the holdouts. See http://www.nypost.com/seven/07052009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/albany__i_give_up_177689.htm?&page=0 Money quote:
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
New York in Decline. Steve Malanga's op-editorial, Shackling New York: Why State is in Decline, in today's New York Post highlights why New York, unless it changes course, is doomed to steady and ultimately perhaps irreversible decline. Malanga notes "New York state is dead last in the freedom index 'by a wide margin,'" according to a recent study by George Mason University's Mercatus Center. The Mercatus Center study, Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom, is available here [PDF]. Malanga queries, and rightfully so in our opinion, as to the consequences of this lack of freedom and states, "[t]he best way to judge is to look at the collective condition of the states with the worst rankings. (New Jersey is in 49th place, following California and Rhode Island.) Further, Malanga reports on the contrast with the study's freest states: New Hampshire, Colorado, South Dakota, Idaho and Texas, which have unemployment rates at or below the national average. (New Hampshire's is 6.2 percent, or two full points below the nation's, according to recent Labor Department statistics.) You decided whether it is also a coincidence that each of these states is a net winner in terms of domestic migration, with far more citizens entering than leaving. The Mercatus' Summary of the Study states:
Labels: economic decline, freedom, New York Monday, April 06, 2009
Danger, Will Robinson!! [h/t David Freddoso in NRO's Corner] Behold the death of the American experiment. For if this idiot's thinking because further pervasive, as it appears to be, there is no end but disaster, disunity and division. As Freddoso, notes "Cook County Board President Todd Stroger recently explained cigarette tax increases in an unexpectedly candid radio interview. Host John Williams asked: Isn't it unfair to keep targeting smokers with tax increases? And it's our experience that the local and state level are following suit. Of course, this is President Obama's bedrock philosophy too in his "share the wealth" program. There's fewer [rich, producers, energy companies, etc.] than poor voters, ergo, tax, tax, tax Group A to get votes of the poorer. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. (At least until your hair falls out completely). |
Officials are looking to convince residents in the Washington, DC metropolitan region that converting every local streets into toll roads would be good for them. The National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board last Wednesday voted to seek federal gas tax funds to bankroll a $400,000 study on how best to sell the public on a controversial per-mile tax proposal that would raise up to $4.8 billion in new revenue.