In the 1919 horror film, sinister hypnotist Dr. Caligari tours the countryside with a dark cabinet from which emerges a somnambulist who apparently murders on Caligari’s orders.
The New York Times editorial board is doing its best to imitate Dr. Caligari by unleashing lethal doctrine from its midtown Manhattan offices upon the all too witless majority of the Empire State, who have been politically sleepwalking since Franklin Roosevelt’s day.
In a September 23rd editorial (Why New York Stagnates), Times editors declare:
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a business executive thinking about moving your company — an upscale, high-tech company — to New York or maybe Connecticut or perhaps California. After a little research, you find out that most of New York’s system for encouraging new businesses is based on one thing: political pork.
There is no workable economic development plan for the whole state. Instead, businesses are forced to beg for a hodgepodge of handouts, each of which depends less on what the companies have to offer in terms of jobs or revenue than on which bigwigs they know in Albany...
The Times’s preference for an economy managed by a single bureaucracy of academic intellectuals is straight out of the socialist play-book, in which only bureaucrats are competent to make make economic decisions. Economic collectivization, in socialist theory, will make production more efficient and will produce an abundance of goods for everyone, whether he works or not.
To paraphrase James Madison with regard to the Constitution, experience has taught us that this theory is at variance with reality, that certain auxiliary matters are of overriding importance.
New York needs a “workable economic development plan for the whole state” much less than it needs to get rid of its welfare state apparatus, labor-union-coddling, and high taxes.
Business goes where it is possible to operate profitably and competitively against domestic and foreign rivals.
The October 10 edition of the Wall Street Journal featured an article (Honda and UAW Clash Over New Factory Jobs) about foreign automobile manufacturers that build plants here in the United States. The Journal reported:
When Honda Motor Co. announced last year that it was building a new plant amid the farms of southeastern Indiana, Hoosiers cheered. Then Honda announced in August that only people living in 20 of the state’s 92 counties could apply for jobs—a move that excluded most of the state’s thousands of unionized laid-off auto workers…
Of the 33 auto, engine and transmission plants in the U.S. that are wholly owned by foreign companies, none have been organized by the UAW, despite repeated attempts. Mainly, foreign auto makers have located plants in Southern states where the UAW has little presence and where right-to-work laws limit union power.
New York ranks in the top tier of states with the highest total tax burdens, the most liberal welfare benefits, the most expensive list of mandated health insurance coverages, and the most socialistic fondness for labor unions.
At the end of World War II, New York was near the top among states in manufacturing output. New York City was the largest manufacturing city in the world.
Their economic collapse in the 1960s is the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, with its abandonment of property rights in favor of socialistic, collectivized control by the political state. The “security” of the welfare state necessitates economic and political servility.
After three quarters of a century worshipping Big Brother, the majority of New York voters no longer know the difference.
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