MI's Myron Magnet - Brilliant Essay: The Obsolete New York Model

[Cowlesy]

I always enjoy reading Myron Magnet. He basically calls on taxpaying New Yorkers like me to fight the system the only way we feasibly can, and that is to LEAVE.

Frankly, I think he's right. This is a long essay, but very, very good in my opinion.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/15/new-york-taxes-opinions-contributors-myron-magnet.html


But in New York, with its vast population of the hereditary minority poor, we now have something less like the rest of America and more like the European welfare state: heavily and inequitably taxed; undemocratic, unsustainable and largely pointless; with government telling us what to eat and where to smoke, using its total control of the school system to accomplish little beyond boosting costs dramatically, subsidizing or dictating the rents on half of the city's rental apartments, forcing private health-insurance buyers to subsidize the care of the indigent and prohibiting us from asking whether those who use the services we pay for are here legally. Our public services, even vital ones like the subway, work badly because they operate less for the convenience of their users than for the sake of their unionized, overpaid employees, now not so much public servants as the public's masters, through the vast political might they wield over so powerful a government.

On top of which, New York state, judged the "least free" state in the nation in a new George Mason University study of personal and economic liberty, is quicker than the other 49 states to wield eminent domain to take away private property and give it to someone else, the absurd extreme of government-forced redistribution. Such unfreedom--along with "swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance"--would have driven the Founders to arms, but New Yorkers have no idea of how to reform a government that is essentially a one-party elective despotism with no checks and balances and no democratic levers of change, such as voters' initiatives and referenda. For us, the clearest solution is to leave, as millions of middle-class individuals and most of our Fortune 500 headquarters have done over the last half-century.

Struggling under the accumulated burden of eight decades of "progressive" government, we New Yorkers can serve as a warning to our fellow Americans as President Obama, following the New Deal playbook, seeks to use the current financial crisis to provide a new rationale and legitimacy for the gargantuan machinery of the federal government.

[Cowlesy]

Our economic ills, the president contends, require expanding the welfare state to include the majority of Americans not just in Medicare and Social Security but also in government-subsidized and -controlled health care and higher education--all paid for by an ever-smaller percentage of the citizens, in the name of European-style redistributionist "fairness."

Logically, this plan is a non sequitur (in the process of turning, by constant repetition, into a Big Lie), since health care and education have nothing to do with the causes or cure of our present economic woes. But logic aside, consider New York's government-controlled services and ask if they are worth taking to nationwide scale. Take a good look at the president's tax plans too, which will end up with many more Americans paying nothing and many fewer paying most of the bills. Once the tax eaters outnumber the taxpayers and can vote themselves an income, you have arrived at elective despotism.

And despotism is the real issue, much larger than high taxes and bad services provided by public employees whose pensions and lifetime health benefits dwarf those of most taxpayers who struggle to support them. Just look beyond European-style New York to Europe proper. In the name of "fairness," European governments have criminalized free speech, with France prosecuting Brigitte Bardot, and Switzerland and Italy prosecuting Oriana Fallaci, for anti-Muslim statements, while the British home secretary who charged her husband's porno movie rentals to the taxpayers has barred Dutch M.P. Geert Wilders and American talk-show host Michael Savage from Britain for fomenting anti-Islamic hatred. The Scandinavian countries have outlawed anti-homosexual speech as well.

As Theodore Dalrymple has written in these pages, governments that take charge of life's important matters--health care, pensions, the education of children--infantilize their citizens, making them so frivolous and torpid that they become unwilling even to defend their country and their way of life. "I have never learned to fight for my freedom," Mark Steyn quotes one Dutchman saying ruefully about the Islamization of his country. "I was only good at enjoying it."

In this spirit, 15 British sailors surrendered without a shot to an Iranian gunboat in the Persian Gulf two years ago. "From the outset, it was very apparent that fighting back was simply not an option," said a marine captain among these latter-day representatives of Lord Nelson's indomitable tars. "Had we chosen to do so, then many of us would not be standing here today." Such unblushing cowardice makes the Royal Navy, for all its costly weaponry, about as fearsome as the expensively armed Saudi or Egyptian air forces.

Another good segment from the essay.

[BillyDkid]

As a fellow New Yorker - yeah, NY really sucks in terms of liberty and is as fundamentally corrupt as a state can be. Too bad, it's a beautiful place (upstate) and I love it here - or rather I would if the government wasn't committed to interfering in our lives in every way possible and to getting all they can from you in terms of the fruits of your labor.
I truly wish everything east of the Hudson would form its own suck hole state. They can have NYC - the capitol of the world.

[Cowlesy]

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[roho76]

What's (MI's)? Michigan?

[Cowlesy]

Manhattan Institute

[roho76]

Manhattan Institute

Ah! Thanks.

[roho76]

Wow. Thanks for that. That was good and I love the chops.

[Anti Federalist]

From the article, quoting FDR commenting on the much needed (insane) growth of government to provide benefits for all:


while big government existed to protect the individual from big business, the individual paradoxically faded out in FDR's worldview, [B]changed in the president's imagination into a unit in the great social machine. "For it is literally true that the self-supporting man or woman has become as extinct as the man of the stone age," he declared. "Without the help of thousands of others, any one of us would die, naked and starved."

Amazing, sounds exactly like the globalist "free traders" around here.

[Cowlesy]

From the article, quoting FDR commenting on the much needed (insane) growth of government to provide benefits for all:



Amazing, sounds exactly like the globalist "free traders" around here.

You cannot support yourself.

You cannot voluntarily choose with whom you will cooperate.

You will work with all others for the collective good.

You shall be assimilated.


**
My favorite part of his essay is calling for NYC Taxpayers to just leave. Get out. Let the Tax Eaters figure out how things work when the producers are gone.

Does the parasite die?

[Anti Federalist]

You cannot support yourself.

You cannot voluntarily choose with whom you will cooperate.

You will work with all others for the collective good.

You shall be assimilated.

I am Borg, I am Legion, for I am many. (had to add that - AF)

**
My favorite part of his essay is calling for NYC Taxpayers to just leave. Get out. Let the Tax Eaters figure out how things work when the producers are gone.

Does the parasite die?

Yes, they should leave.

I don't know how you stand it, myself.

Eventually it will die, the only thing that's keeping it from dieing now, like it would have back in the 70s, is cheap debt, cheap dollars and cheap imports.

[Cowlesy]

Yes, they should leave.

I don't know how you stand it, myself.

Eventually it will die, the only thing that's keeping it from dieing now, like it would have back in the 70s, is cheap debt, cheap dollars and cheap imports.

I don't understand how many New Yorkers feel they deserve the fat jobs they have when they're so damn incompetent. Now that is not all public workers, but my goodness some of them act like they're kings of the metro, or townhall when you go deal with them. I guess it makes sense since it takes an act of God to fire one of them.

But like Magnet says, the more largess builds, the more the taxeaters will vote to continue voting themselves an income. Why bother taking care of oneself when there are people ready to give you handouts (as long as you keep them receiving a fat public salary).

The system is broken.

[GreenCardSeeker]

And despotism is the real issue, much larger than high taxes and bad services provided by public employees whose pensions and lifetime health benefits dwarf those of most taxpayers who struggle to support them. Just look beyond European-style New York to Europe proper. In the name of "fairness," European governments have criminalized free speech, with France prosecuting Brigitte Bardot, and Switzerland and Italy prosecuting Oriana Fallaci, for anti-Muslim statements, while the British home secretary who charged her husband's porno movie rentals to the taxpayers has barred Dutch M.P. Geert Wilders and American talk-show host Michael Savage from Britain for fomenting anti-Islamic hatred. The Scandinavian countries have outlawed anti-homosexual speech as well.

It bugs me a bit that almost all the time I read depictions of hate laws in Europe in American media, they only seem to cover anti-Islamic statements. The afore-mentioned people have strong ties to American neo-cons, which I guess is the reason. None of them even recieved any prison terms and no one of them are scholars or sincere political activists, so it's strange that they're presented as martyrs. Europe has sentenced hundreds of people to prison for sincere and honest activism on the other hand, with little attention from mass media anywhere. If anything should be covered, it's the people who have recieved 5-6 year prison terms in spite of not having committed any violence or threatened anyone. But these people aren't neo-cons of course, but rather anti-zionists.

If you take this neo-con press seriously, you'd get the impression that there are lots and lots of Muslims trying to undermine free speech in Europe.. That work was started long before them by Jewish groups like the Simon Wiesenthal centre, the Muslims are just being used as scapegoats.

I'm still waiting for American MSM describing it as an outrage that someone is sentenced to prison for arguing that the holocaust didn't happen. Something like 90% of all prison time delivered under the European hate laws are related to that topic.

[Cowlesy]

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