In a better universe than ours—there must be one—the provincial New York politicians and union leaders who cut off not their own noses but that of the city’s poor, and (to thoroughly manhandle the metaphor) not to spite their faces but to protect their power, would be punished—very indirectly—by a slow decline in the Great City’s wealth and prominence.
But that’s very unlikely to happen. As intelligent observers—there are several—like Josh Barro pointed out, Amazon does need New York—a little—but can satisfy that need without the big Queens operation, simply by expanding their existing offices in Manhattan. But the big expansion, which would have significantly boosted revenues for the city and increased property values and job opportunities across the income scale in that borough, has been thrown away so that glamourpuss Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can exercise her “rage” and deadbeat politicians and union bosses can protect their fiefdoms.
Old-line politicians needed to protect themselves from the “hate the rich” line peddled by Alexandria, while union folks had a “genuine” interest in resisting the arrival of such a powerful anti-union employer. It’s, uh, “amusing” that Alexandria et al. want to go back to the fifties just as much as the Trumpies do, when, supposedly, everyone had a high-paying, no sweat union job. Amusing, if you ignore the fact that while New York has a fairly effective income-redistribution program that takes money from billionaires and millionaires and distributes it down to overpaid, less than hard working civil servants and unionized workers in the private sector, it provides frequently terrible public services to the poor. To quote, extensively, from a New York Times article by Luis Ferré-Sadurni and Benjamin Weiser last November:
A federal judge rejected a sweeping settlement on Wednesday that would have appointed a monitor to oversee the troubled New York City Housing Authority and required the city to pump at least $1.2 billion into repairs.
The judge, William H. Pauley III, also strongly suggested that the federal government should take over the authority instead.
In a scathing opinion, Judge Pauley deplored the “breathtaking scope” of the squalid living conditions in the city’s public housing complexes. He rebuked the city for its mismanagement of the agency, and said the federal government had abdicated its legal responsibility to overhaul the nation’s largest stock of public housing that is home to about 400,000 vulnerable New Yorkers.
The unexpected ruling threw the future of the Housing Authority into doubt and unraveled a deal that Mayor Bill de Blasio had staked his reputation on as a champion of public housing tenants.
Yes, because heroic liberal Bill de Blasio, though he fancies himself as the tribune of the poor, is in fact the tribune of the $150,000 a year civil servant, paid to do nothing.
Yes, it would be nice to see New York suffer, if only that suffering could be allotted to those who deserve it. Where is a vengeful God when you need one?
Afterwords
As I've previously noted, in a long litany bewailing the shortcomings of the Democratic Party, the average subway worker in New York makes $150,000 a year, and every train has two operators, unlike every other system in the world, who manage to get by with one. It also costs $3.5 billion to lay a mile of subway track in New York, seven times the cost of any other city in the world. Yet the unique attractions of New York, unlikely to be surpassed by Crystal City any time soon, are likely to keep the Big Apple on top for the foreseeable future.
