These Guys Want to Run Health Care?

CNN reports that garbage pick up in the public sector-and-Wall Street dominated Big Apple has scarcely resumed.  Even legacy media like CNN can't help but observe that:

"This weekend, a city with some of the most tight garbage disposal regulations in the country, looked like a dumpster, with piles of garbage on streets and sidewalks."

Whatever the cause, a publicly run New York Santiation Department (NYSD) once again demonstrates that the public sector cannot do the job.  Pinni Bohm points out that  The Daily News's Juan Gonzalez blames Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who is a privatization advocate.  But the NYSD is not privatized, so the Daily News once more illustrates the old proverb: take reason and sanity away from a blogger and you get the legacy media.  In order to blame privatization for the problems, first the NYSD would have had to have been privatized.  Gonzalez lacks the reason and sanity necessary to put the blame where it belongs:  on the incompetently run public sector which has sucked New York dry for 15 decades (yes, Juan, government bloat and incompetence in New York go back that far).

New York must make up its mind.  Either  (1) continue to pay 40% wage premiums to under-worked, unproductive and incompetent  public sector unions or (2) become competitive.  Privatization is a workable method of accomplishing (2).   But blaming privatization for the incompetence of a non-privatized public sector-run SD is, to put it plainly, BS.

Worse, there have been allegations that the NYSD's middle managers deliberately  told workers to shirk their duties.  These allegations have been made in The New York Post. But The News and Gonzalez choose to chant the excessively staffed NYSD's party line that all workers must be micro-managed or they cannot do their jobs.  Maybe it is Juan Gonzalez who needs additional management.

Adam Smith on Third Parties

"It is needless to observe, I presume, that both rebels and hereticks are those unlucky persons who, when things have come to a certain degree of violence, have the misfortune to be of the weaker party.  In a nation distracted by faction, there are, no doubt, always a few, though  commonly but a very few, who preserve their judgment untainted by the general contagion.  They seldom amount to more than, here and there, a solitary individual, without any influence, excluded by his own candour, from the confidence of either party, and who, though he may be one of the wisest, is necessarily upon that very account, one of the most insignificant men in the society.  All such people are held in contempt and derision, frequently in detestation, by the furious zealots of both parties.  A true party-man hates and despises candour; and in reality there is no vice which could so effectually disqualify him for the trade of a party-man as that single virtue.  The real, revered and impartial spectator, therefore, is upon no occasion at a greater distance than amidst the violence and rage of contending parties.  To them, it may be said, that such a spectator scarce exists any where in the universe...Of all the corrupters of moral sentiments, therefore, faction and fanaticism have always been by far the greatest."

--Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 205-6

Slime Beneath the City's Fallen Snow

New York City Counicilman Dan Halloran is New York's only major elected official with a libertarian background.  Last week, a major snow storm afflicted the Big Apple.  Just as in 1969 during the mayoralty of the late John W. Linday, the Sanitation Department failed to perform.  There was public snit about the lack of snow removal.  My good friend Glenda McGee forwarded a December 30 New York Post article quoting Halloran as saying that managers from within the Sanitation Department had ordered a work slowdown.  If it occurred, it lead to deaths and other serious harm.  According to informants who brought the information to Halloran, the protest concerned promotions and budget cuts.  Union officials Harry Nespoli and Joseph Mannion as well as Sanitation Department spokesperson Matthew Lipani deny a slowdown occurred.  However, the Post asserts that multiple Sanitation Department sources have said that:

"angry plow drivers have only been clearing streets assigned to them even if that means they have to drive through snowed-in roads with their plows raised...One mechanic said some drivers are purposely smashing plows and salt spreaders to further stall the cleanup effort."

Mayor Bloomberg's absurd response was to blame residents for shoveling snow into streets.  But according to Halloran, "snitches" said that:

"they were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file."

It is time to privatize the Department of Sanitation.  Competition has drastically improved the dismal telephone service of the former New York Telephone (I remember when one had to restrict long distance calls because of high costs, for instance). New York's sanitation workers are paid much more than comparable private sector workers.  Here in rural Olive, New York snow removal usually is complete within a day or at most two after a storm despite higher highway mileage per capita.  The little city of Kingston, NY, 25 miles from here, also has a public sanitation department that is inefficient and in need of privatization.

Mayor Bloomberg's response to the accusations of shirking and inefficiency in his Santitation Department has been cowardly.

I wrote the following letter to Mayor Bloomberg:

PO Box 130

West Shokan, NY 12494

Mayor Michael Bloomberg

City Hall
New York, NY 10007

Dear Mayor Bloomberg:

As someone who relies on New York City to earn my livelihood, I urge you to privatize the New York City Sanitation Department.  According to Councilman Dan Halloran and the New York Post, the recent John Lindsay-like problems that you have suffered result from an illegal, irresponsible and murderous work stoppage. 

The Sanitation Department is not functioning competently or morally.  Its workers are overpaid and under-productive.  The irresponsible stoppage caused people to die. You are the person ultimately responsible to investigate and ferret out the malefactors.  But much more important action is needed.  It is time to eliminate a white elephant that New Yorkers cannot afford.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert

David Stockman Rails at GOP Incompetence

Last month I gave a talk at the Kingston-Rhinebeck Tea Party.  I pointed out that the GOP's commitment to the Fed has permitted the flourishing of a wide range of special interest groups. In turn, the Fed engenders income inequality, American economic decline, especially in manufacturing, and Wall Street's expansion.  Howard S. Katz has been making these points since the 1970s and earlier, and they key off the Austrians  Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.  Ron Paul and his son Rand make similar points as well, and they should be viewed as the leaders of the political movement that aims to undo the massive damage that the the parties of the elephant and the donkey have caused (the Democrats are worse than the GOP).

Marketwatch's Paul B. Farrell reports that the cornerstone of the legacy media, the New York Times,  has published David Stockman's article making these points with the clarity and specificity of an insider with important historical knowledge.  Stockman was President Reagan's budget director who lost a battle against Reagan' supply siders.  Stockman argues that the GOP destroyed the American economy in four steps:

1. Richard Nixon's dropping of the gold standard at the behest of Milton Friedman and his defaulting on the American obligation to redeem dollars for gold internationally

2. President Reagan's neo-Keynesian doctrine of supply-side economics

3. The expansion of Wall Street and the recent expansion of the money supply

4. The financing of American credit through foreign debt, resulting in increasing income inequality and the exit of factory jobs.

I have made all these points since 2004.  Stockman is specific as to much of the historical detail.  The Marketwatch article is well worth reading.  Stockman notes:

"the top 1% of Americans -- paid mainly from the Wall Street casino -- received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90% -- mainly dependent on Main Street's shrinking economy -- got only 12%. This growing wealth gap is not the market's fault. It's the decaying fruit of bad economic policy."

That the GOP continues to support the stupid policies of the Rockefeller-Bush Republicans contributes as much to American decline as do Obama's policies.  While the Democratic Party is lost, the GOP should serve as the rational alternative. Instead, it has followed the ideology of the Democrats into big government extremism and economic decline.  When questioned about the Patriot Act, many Republicans simply spin and lay the blame on President Clinton.  The large circulation legacy media contribute to the absence of mass level debate.  Stockman's recent article conveniently appears in the Times a year after the massive bailouts and money printing escapades (chiefly under the Democrats, incidentally) that may have put the nation's collapse into third gear.

Those Democrats who wish to make partisan hay out of Stockman's Op Ed might consider that the only people making these arguments for the past 40 years have been Republicans.  Which does not mitigate the ill effects of Milton Friedman and his colleagues in academia along with the Rockefeller-Bush Republicans.