A Stitch in Haste

New York: Bruno's Replacement "Not on Record" Regarding Gay Marriage

Kip — 2008-06-24T16:06+00:00

His name is Dean G. Skelos, he represents Rockville Center, a relatively upscale Long Island community (Bruno represented Brunswick, in the very conservative upstate capitol district).

Three data points:

1. This site, the reliability of which is unclear, lists Skelos as "not on record" regarding same-sex marriage.

2. He did, however, vote against a gay civil rights bill in 2002.

3. On the other hand, he was a leading sponsor of a recent bill to make noose displays a hate crime: "There is no place for racism and intimidation in America."

In any case, my earlier observation is unchanged: Even assuming that the Republicans maintain their wafer-thin majority in the State Senate, Skelos would be entering the triumvirate from a position of weakness, and with a far different set of priorities. If Governor Paterson and Speaker Silver press the issue, it is hard not to see Skelos capitulating on allowing a vote on gay marriage -- which would very likely pass.

Stay tuned...

"Tragedy of the Commons" Agenda Item of the Day

Kip — 2008-06-07T21:06+00:00

Item Number Two on the Agenda:

Discussion of the overcrowding at John Jay Pool during the summer months.

John Jay Pool is of course located in John Jay Park, a massive* WPA-era project that is city-owned, taxpayer-funded — and admission-free.

And it's overcrowded? Who could possibly have seen that coming?

(*Not so massive that they are able find any space among the playgrounds, swimming pool, tennis and basketball courts and handball walls for even a modest dog run. Go figure.)

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For those who simply must know — Item Number One on the Agenda:

Discussion of the proposed variance for Mt. Sinai Hospital's planned tower at 102nd Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. Concern centers on the degree of shadowing this tower would cause in Central Park[.]

Yet another ~~not-for-profit~~ cold, cruel, soulless hospital oppressing the community with their ~~healthcare-providing~~ frivolous, predatory, pharmaceutical-industrial-complex, might-throw-a-shadow tower? Have they no shame! How lucky we are indeed to have unelected "Community Boards" to protect us from these out-of-control leviathans!

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The flier announcing the Community Board meeting has, in bold-italic, all-cap font:

OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT NOTICE
It also has this:

Good for government work, I guess.

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It also has this on the back:

Recycled Paper — For a Healthy & Sustainable Environment
Recycled — oh joy. On the other hand, these fliers adorned every — every — lamppost, traffic signal, utility box and pay phone in my neighborhood. Any one street block would have as many as five of these posted. How environmentally friendly is that? (And did I mention the masking tape — was that recycled too?)

Linkfest: Moral Defective Watch

Kip — 2008-06-04T17:06+00:00

They wants the precious...

ITEM: After quietly running for president while insisting that he wasn't running for president, and after insisting that he had no intention of doing anything other than being a full-time philanthropist after his second term as New York City mayor ends, Michael Bloomberg has suddenly decided -- surprise! -- that, gosh darn it, he's just too important not to continue micromanaging every nook and cranny of the city and every decision the people in it make --

Mr. Bloomberg, as part of that effort, commissioned a poll recently to determine whether city voters would be open to lifting the term limits law, which forces him and other elected city officials from office after two four-year terms. The poll found that even as voters approved of his performance as mayor, they would strongly oppose any attempt to undo the limits.
...
The deliberations are occurring as the mayor expresses frustration that his agenda is unfinished and that some of his more ambitious proposals, like congestion pricing, have been blocked by lawmakers in Albany. And despite his previous public statements that he is looking forward to focusing on philanthropy full time after leaving office, people who have spoken to Mr. Bloomberg say he has clearly been bitten by the political bug and is not eager to give up the power that comes with elected office.

A hubris-drenched politician becoming hopelessly, disturbingly addicted to power? Who could possibly have seen that coming?

ITEM: Across the Hudson, very very very incumbent New Jersey senator Frank Lautenberg easily survived a primary challenge from fellow Democrat, Representative Rob Andrews. The central issue in the primary was not so much Lautenberg's age -- 84 -- but rather his hypocrisy for having used age -- 26 years ago -- against his first opponent, Millicent Fenwick (aged 72 at the time). Incidentally, the 84-year old Lautenberg is only the third oldest Senator, behind Robert Byrd (90) and Ted Stevens (84). The median age is 70; McCain is 71, Clinton is 60, Barack Obama (third youngest) is 46.

ITEM: Speaking of Hillary Clinton ... well, "Hillary Clinton." Enough said.

"Comment Left Elsewhere" of the Day

Kip — 2008-05-30T18:05+00:00

Damn activist governors!

"It's a perfect example of a governor overstepping his authority and sidestepping the democratic process," said Brian Raum, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, a national organization opposed to same-sex marriage. "It's an issue of public policy that should be decided by the voters.

This is, of course, utter nonsense, as anyone who has been following the New York situation is aware. As I explained at another blawg:

Paterson was simply implementing the unambiguous recent ruling by NY courts (up to and including the state equivalent of a denial of certiorari) that long-standing NY statute and precedent require recognition of valid out-of-state marriages, even when those marriages could not be entered into in NY itself.

How is "doing what the courts say must be done" a case of "executive activism"?

First prize, meanwhile, goes to Gary Bauer, who is lamenting that an "activist" governor (who of course must be immediately impeached) has "overturned" (somehow) a court ruling!

But the governor's action effectively circumvents the state's highest court, bows to foreign law and violates the principle of separation of powers by superseding the legislature. Again, we are witnessing the advance of the homosexual agenda by the most undemocratic means possible. The governor of New York and the appeals court judges should be impeached.

The courts defy the will of the legislature. The legislature defies the will of the people. The people defy the will of the people back in 2000. The governor defies the will of the courts. The courts defy the ... wait, what?

The consequentialist vacuousness of anti-gay social conservatives has never been more prominently on display.

Whatever it takes to rationalize your bigotry, folks. Whatever it takes...

(Bauer quote via Good As You.)

Gay Rights and the Lessons of Maurice v. Judd

Kip — 2008-05-27T10:05+00:00

"And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good."
--Genesis 1:21 (KJV)

"I can say positively, that a whale is no more a fish than a man; nobody pretends to the contrary now-a-days, but lawyers and politicians."
--Samuel Latham Mitchell, 1818

"Why, some folks says whales isn't fish at all. I rayther calculate they are, myself. Whales has fins, so has fish; whales has slick skins, so has fish; whales has tails, so has fish; whales ain't got scales on 'em, neither has catfish, nor eels, nor tadpoles, nor frogs, nor horse-leeches, I conclude, then whales is fish. Everybody had oughter call 'em so. Nine out of ten doos call 'em fish."
--Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, 1846

Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature, by D. Graham Burnett (Princeton University Press, 2007)

Is a whale a fish?

In the modern era, anyone with a fragment of intelligence and a fragment of education knows the answer: Of course not.

But two hundred years ago, that question was actually hotly debated. Intelligent people, experts even, fiercely argued whether a whale was a fish. And centuries before that, there was likewise a time when anyone with a fragment of intelligence and a fragment of education knew the answer: Of course a whale was a fish.

From obvious to obvious, with a pesky period of uncertainty in between. Such is the zoological and taxonomic history of the whale. Just as the history of gay marriage will eventually become.

And, as with most things modern or even semi-modern, the interregnum of uncertainty over what was once obvious (and would be obvious again, just in the opposite direction) wound up in court. In the matter of the nature of the whale, the court was in New York City in 1818, in a case called Maurice v. Judd.

The facts of Maurice v. Judd could not be more boring: The New York State legislature had enacted an inspection regime for fish oil (which came in a broad spectrum of varieties and qualities — and therefore prices). Transacting in uninspected fish oil was a minor offense punishable by a $25 fine per barrel. Maurice (the fish oil inspector) fined Judd (a candlemaker and oil merchant) $75 for buying three barrels of uninspected fish oil. Judd refused to pay the fine, insisting that he had not bought "fish oil," but whale oil.

For historical perspective: 1818 was 41 years before On the Origin of Species was published and 33 years before Moby Dick. Even without the yet-to-be-opened Erie Canal, New York was already the top commercial center of North America — and was fast becoming the scientific and intellectual capital as well. Both fishing and whaling were dominant industries in the city. One of the most popular recreational destinations in New York was Scudder's New American Museum — later Barnum's American Museum — which counted among its main attractions a massive whale jawbone.

By 1818, the role of the whale in both people's imaginations and their wallets led to some intellectual quandaries about whales and whaling: If a whale is a fish, then why is its tail horizontal rather than vertical? Why do whales not have scales? Why do whales breathe air (that whales could drown was a proven fact by then), and give birth rather than lay eggs (and nurse their young with milk)? Why were whales so much smarter than lesser fish? (Apart from the challenge of their size was the challenge of their brains — whaling is hunting, not mere fishing.) And, perhaps most importantly, why did the insides of whales — which were known in the most minute detail as a simple commercial matter — resemble not the lesser fishes but rather cows and pigs?

On the other hand, to many (but not all) zoologists of the time, the inside of a whale would have been totally irrelevant. In terms of what today is known as "taxonomy," shape and environment were the categorical bases for grouping animals, not internal anatomy. Whales looked like fish (tails and blowholes notwithstanding) and lived where fish lived (the 1817 edition of a leading English dictionary defined fish simply as "an animal that lived exclusively in water"). Therefore whales are fish, QED.

Not to mention that pesky Bible problem: Genesis clearly delineated creation by environment: "fish of the sea" (so, as a matter of elementary Judeo-Christian theology, oysters and crabs are "fish"), "fowl of the air" (bats?), and "every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." Again, whales don't creepeth upon the earth, so the notion that they are "animals" was fundamentally un-Christian and even bordered on blasphemy.

And of course the Bible contains some stray verses specifically (and definitively?) "resolving" the whale-fish conundrum. In (English versions of) the Old Testament, Jonah is a swallowed by a fish; in Matthew he spends three days in the whale's belly. And since the Bible is the inerrant Word of God (even after translating it into English), as a matter of simple (Christian) logic, a whale must therefore "obviously" be a fish.

On the other hand, there had been some other "problem cases" even before the whales. Seals sometimes "creepeth upon the earth" and clearly had appendages like the familiar land quadrupeds (but not four appendages, which was a major headache for the zoologists of the time). And no one was calling turtles "fish" in 1818.

Indeed, by 1818 zoologists had generally conceded that their field was far from complete and that debate and dissent about proper taxonomic classification was not only permissible but inevitable — especially as new species of just about everything kept being discovered. (Linnaeus himself had formally separated whales from fish in 1766.) Moreover, the leading natural history scholars — particularly Samuel Latham Mitchell, a retired politician who also happened to be the pre-eminent authority on the fishes of New York and the founder of what would become the New York Academy of Sciences — led the charge among American natural historians to convert taxonomy to a science of dissection: that species should be grouped together by how they looked on the inside rather than on the outside.

And he was almost universally damned for it. His high-profile (and uncompromising) testimony in Maurice v. Judd that "a whale is no more a fish than a man" essentially ended his status a popular quasi-celebrity in New York high society. In modern terms, this former senator and premiere intellectual had become politically radioactive for defying the will of the majority.

---

Besides the Biblical (non-)arguments, some of the "whales are fish" rationales invoked in Maurice v. Judd will sound familiar to advocates of same-sex marriage today: Whales are fish because they've always been fish — why should "tradition" yield to new ways of thinking? Whales are fish because the majority of people think they're fish — their lack of any particular knowledge or expertise on the matter notwithstanding.

The discomfort, indeed disgust, experienced by a growing number of enlightened sailors and other observers upon seeing the cruel nature of whaling generally (and the especially inhumane ritual of pursuing a mother whale that would defend — to her death — her offspring) was countered by ubiquitous popular descriptions of whales as "monstrous" and even satanic. Whales therefore deserved no sympathy whatsoever as they were brutally slaughtered wholesale (literally — this was a business, after all). It's a tried and true defense mechanism: The easiest way not to have to worry about being fair to something, or someone, is to dismissively demonize it, or them.

And, some argued, even if whales are indeed "not fish," then they're still certainly not mammals — give them a separate taxonomic class if you must, but don't dare "weaken" the "privileged" status of "mammal" (the highest form of subhuman animal) by extending it to whales.

And speaking of "subhuman," if scientists start saying that whales are closely related to, e.g., primates, then what's to stop them from eventually saying that people are closely related to primates? And if, biologically, insides matter more than outsides, then what does that say about race? As Burnett chronicles:

Conveniently [co-counsel] was there to conjure up those very dreams, darkening the nightmare with the bogies of race, civic disorder, and excessively universal franchise. ... [He] warned of what might lie ahead if the men of science were given license to interpret the statutes of the state.

Damn activist scientists!

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So what happened? After some wrangling about whether statutory interpretation should even be a question left to the lay jurors of a municipal trial court (a debate we sometimes have to this day), the judge charged the jury — which, after a whopping 15 minutes of deliberation, ruled as a matter of legally binding "fact" that a whale is indeed a fish. More than a century before Scopes, science was put on trial, and was convicted.

The media largely celebrated the triumph of common sense (and Scripture) over newfangled philosophizing. But there was an undertow:

Even as these flippant voices rose to hail the legal affirmation of common sense and common usage, a second chorus, or perhaps a mumble, sounded a lower note. As men ... circulated word of the court's decision among the learned circles of Philadelphia and Boston, heads collectively shook at this new performance of New York's stridently philistine culture. Whales as fish? The better sort knew better.

Modern sophistication anchored in Philadelphia and Boston, with New York as a "flyover city"? Go figure.

(The case was immediately appealed, but the New York legislature intervened and promptly amended the inspection statute to specifically exempt whale oil, rendering the entire litigation moot.)

---

I doubt anyone would call it an abomination to suggest that the quest to drag the law — and the Bible, and the masses — into modernity is far more urgent in the context of gay marriage than it was in the context of whale oil. The point is that facts tend to win out in the end, and that the occasional legal roadblocks that slow us all down on the path to jurisprudential enlightenment are temporary and fleeting. That may have provided little solace to Mr. Judd upon hearing the jury verdict, and may be cold comfort to gays who see their neighbors constitutionalize bigotry today. But even when you lose, knowing that victory is somewhere down the road keeps you going.

Just try not to get harpooned along the way.

I Have Found a More Wretched Hive!

Kip — 2008-05-20T10:05+00:00

I went to my co-op's annual shareholder meeting last night. One of the two main topics for discussion was the plan of one of our non-residential neighbors to add floors to its pre-existing structures nearby, potentially reducing, modestly, the (unimpressive) views of some residents.

One of my fellow residents (whose view is not at risk) asked a simple question: "Has there been any discussion of what they will be required to give back to the community?"

"They," incidentally, are a hospital. A not-for-profit teaching and research hospital in fact.

And they are being damned for "not giving back to the community"?

Remind me again where I'll find the scum and villainy?

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The other hot topic was the board's proposal to implement a transfer fee, also called a "flip tax," of up to two percent of the sales price whenever an apartment is sold. The debate centered entirely on how much money it would raise for the ~~collective~~ cooperative versus the impact on individual apartment values — the classic "us versus ourselves" doggerel that arises whenever some members of a group want to sacrifice other members "for the good of the whole."

As I sat there listening to the oblivious arguments and the more oblivious counter-arguments, I wondered whether anyone would ask the simple question of why a fee should be imposed that does not reflect an underlying cost? We pay maintenance fees that reflect the underlying costs of running the building. Fair enough. We pay move-in and move-out fees because moving in and moving out consume resources (staff, use of elevators, etc.). Fair enough.

But what cost is being offset by a transfer fee? None was identified. The only selling point was "It's money for us!" How is it that good ethics, or even good accounting? If we pit ourselves against each other in this way, then what will be the next way?

I will be voting against the proposal, though for some reason I suspect the wolf vote will prevail over the sheep vote. Just a hunch.

"Comment Left Elsewhere" of the Day

Kip — 2008-04-30T12:04+00:00

Tyler Cowen asks a simple question:

How good would the abolition of zoning in New York City be?

Of course, that question completely drops the context within which "good" is embedded. Stated differently: "Good" -- by what metric? Real estate values? Total available housing stock? Aesthetics? Whose aesthetics?

Suddenly it's not so simple a question after all.

How about defining "good" as "respecting property rights and constitutional principles"? As I commented at Cowen's blog:

Sorry for the Clintonism, but it depends (as you note) on what your definition of "zoning" is.

First-order zoning -- an area is simply designated "residential," "commercial" or "industrial" -- is not an excruciating abomination to libertarians and can be defended, at least in the abstract, as externality-correcting.

Second-order zoning -- height restrictions are the best example -- are less defensible and should be presumed illegitimate (i.e., restrictions should be subject to heightened scrutiny). This is the kind of "zoning" imposed on most of Manhattan.

Third-order zoning -- where any and every alteration, expansion or demolition must be submitted to an unelected board with near-plenary authority to approve or reject the project -- for any reason up to and including the whim and caprice of the board members -- is per se illegitimate, and under any sane jurisprudence such an infringement of fundamental property rights would be an irrebuttable due process violation. (So-called "historic districts" -- of which there are many in New York City -- are the most egregious example.)

Yes, the "first-second-third" nomenclature is my own concoction, inspired by similar terminology in the context of price discrimination.

More thoughts from Perfect Substitute

Stitch in Haste Podcast #004

Kip — 2008-04-21T11:04+00:00

Now available — the Stitch in Haste Podcast, Episode #004.

In this episode: Why Diamond is a libertarian --

Dogs are property-rights Lockeans.

My adventures with the dog licensing bureaucracy.

The divine-right theory of parks commissioners.

Why breed-specific legislation is unconstitutional.

Powered by Podbean.com---

About the Podcast:

The idea will be to record a quick commentary, no more than weekly (and typically less than weekly) and never longer than 20 minutes, either about something I don't feel like covering in a full-blown blogpost, or something that I have already covered in the blog and don't feel like revisiting. Eventually I might include responses to comments, interviews, roundtable discussions, etc.

Related post chain: Breed-Specific ~~Legislation~~ Blogposting.

"Comment Left Elsewhere" of the Day

Kip — 2008-04-14T12:04+00:00

A blog I don't read, on the Obama "bitter" kerfuffle:

By nearly every measure, working-class Midwesterners and Pennsylvanians, black and white, have been left behind for the last thirty years. They were failed by Clinton and Bush administration policies that allowed major corporations tax breaks for sheltering their money in offshore havens. They were stiffed by a wild-West subprime mortgage market whose collapse has forced many blue-collar homeowners into foreclosure. They lived in places that have been ravaged by sixty years of systematic federal disinvestment. They were left behind by the Republican evisceration of labor laws that once protected the rights of workers to organize. They have watched their wages have stagnated, as their pensions and benefits have been cut, and as their once decent jobs have been replaced by McJobs.

To which I commented at a blog I do read, which cited the above passage favorably:

So everyone's to blame except: (1) the unions that collectively bargained almost every heavy industry in America straight into bankruptcy, and (2) the local politicians who had decade after decade to "do something" about their declining economic bases? Go figure.

New York City has seen its economic base wiped out with a regularity that would put cicadas to shame. Slave-running gave way to agriculture gave way to Erie Canal terminus gave way to light manufacturing gave way to finance gave way to heavy manufacturing gave way to corporate nexus gave way to shipping gave way to heavy industry gave way to new corporate nexus gave way to finance gave way to "Silicon Alley" gave way to...

Times change, economies change — cities must change too. New York has been doing so for almost 400 years. Other American cities, such as San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Seattle, St. Louis, San Diego, and countless others have, via their entrepreneurs, likewise reinvented themselves with at least some success.

What, exactly, are Pittsburgh's, Cleveland's and Detroit's excuse (besides "systematic federal disinvestment" -- whatever that is supposed to mean)?

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As for Obama's speech itself, I have little to add except to take exception to the inclusion of gay marriage in his laundry list of scapegoats. People don't vote against gay marriage because they're "bitter." People vote against gay marriage because they're cruel, vicious, loathsome, un-Christian bigots. No other explanation is required or acceptable.

What Separates Bloomberg from Chavez and Mugabe?

Kip — 2008-04-13T19:04+00:00

Possibly not much:

A source with close ties to the administration says the mayor wants to remain in public office after his tenure ends on Dec. 31, 2009, and is discussing running for a third term.
...
One tantalizing scenario that has been discussed, according to the source, has Bloomberg asking a new Charter Revision Commission to put a referendum on the ballot amending term limits so that he could serve a third term.
...
Bloomberg said during his January State of the City address that he planned to appoint the new Charter Revision Commission and have it conduct a top-to-bottom review of government. He would appoint all members of the commission and could request the body put the term-limit issue on the November ballot.

Another "source" says the report is nonsense. Let's hope so.

Even if the report is bunk, what is undeniably true is that Bloomberg is as megalomaniacal a moral defective as anyone in current American politics. If he does not seek a third term, or the White House, or the governor's mansion, it would not be due to a lack of appetite for power on his part.

From his first day in office, Bloomberg has proceeded from the dual premises (to him, they're axioms) that: (1) every idea he has is, by definition, brilliant; and (2) everyone who disagrees with him is, by definition, a moron. He has, more brazenly than any currently serving politician I can name, simultaneously climbed the twin summits of "worst activist legislator" and "worst nanny-stater." He has set entirely new standards of hubris, by which every future moral defective New York politician will be measured.

As joyous a day as January 20, 2009, will be, I am at least as excited about January 1, 2010, when Bloomberg will (hopefully) morph from "dedicated public servant" to "dedicated public gadfly."

"Comment Left Elsewhere" of the Day

Kip — 2008-04-09T02:04+00:00

(I might make this an intermittent feature.)

Today's comment left elsewhere:

So solar is not now "cost-competitive with other forms of electricity"? We're going to spend money to waste money?

How utterly Bloomberg.

Incidentally, the money referenced is federal taxpayer money -- cf., this old post.

My First and Last Post on Bear Stearns

Kip — 2008-03-17T21:03+00:00

There's not much to say, and I said it here:

There is a difference between "bailing out" and "underwriting the orderly liquidation of." The Fed, via JPM, is doing the latter, not the former.

A perfectly reasonable libertarian case can be made that neither undertaking is a legitimate function of government (just as it is not a legitimate function of government to use the tax code or monetary tools to foster home ownership in the first place). But there is nevertheless a substantive difference between the two forms of intervention.

For who require analogies: Rescuing the FSLIC (a government program, incidentally) was "bailing out"; the Resolution Trust Corporation was "underwriting the orderly liquidation of." Saying "this is just like the S&L crisis" achieves nothing (other than to prove one's ignorance about the subject).

"Atlas Shrugged" Quote of the Day

Kip — 2008-03-15T23:03+00:00

It's the chance dangers that I'm afraid of — the senseless, unpredictable dangers of a world falling apart. Consider the physical risks of complex machinery in the hands of blind fools and fear-crazed cowards. ... They'll reach the stage where no day will pass without a major wreck. ... Plane crashes, oil tank explosions, blast-furnace break-outs, high-tension wire electrocutions, subway cave-ins and trestle collapses — they'll see them all.

I think about that passage quite often. Guess I have to think about it some more:

Meanwhile:

"This is an absolute disgrace," [Manhattan Borough President Scott] Stringer said. "We need better inspection and more resources.

Maybe if Mr. Stringer had spent a little less of his resources on trash cans?

Of course, the irony, indeed the tragedy, is that when the government usurps safety and maintenance monitoring from the private sector, and then botches it, the "disgrace" in the politicians' minds is that government doesn't usurp even more.

As I commented elsewhere recently:

Safety certifications as a tragedy of the commons?

Let's review:

--Underwriters Laboratories, Good Housekeeping Seal, Consumer Reports, Moody's, etc.: Private (non-profit in some instances, but private). Not to mention Zagat's, TripAdvisor, U.S. News rankings, etc.

--USDA, FDA, CPSC, etc.: Government.

Are you really sure you want to play this game?

The government has crowded out private safety certification in food, drugs, etc., and you lament that strictly governmental failure as "the consequences of laissez faire"? Wow, just wow.

Do we have (semi-competent at best and lethal at worst) government safety bureaucracies because we have no private services to perform them, or do we have no private services to perform them because we have government safety bureaucracies?

Who Should Pay for Mass Transit? (Part Two)

Kip — 2008-03-07T12:03+00:00

In Part One I explained how modern liberal urban planners, as represented by the New York Times, have completely detached themselves from the underlying reasoning behind, and implications of, a government-run natural monopoly such as mass transit.

Exhibit B, also from the New York Times, demonstrates that "size matters not" —

When Senator Moynihan first proposed replacing the cramped and confusing corridors of Pennsylvania Station, the nation's busiest transit hub, with an elegant, spacious, glass-enclosed station, he envisioned it being built with public dollars.

But in the years since, officials have concluded that government cannot afford the cost — as much as $3 billion to rebuild Penn Station — and that the only way to finance a new station was to entice private developers to do it. In exchange, those developers would be allowed to build, in grand scale, around the new station.

How can it be that "the nation's busiest transit hub" cannot finance its own relocation and expansion? Do economies of scale and the distinction between capital spending and current accounts somehow not apply to a large, long-term project like a train station?

If so, then every business school curriculum, indeed every introductory economics course, is 100% dead wrong.

George Will once mocked the first President Bush's inaugural address in which he lamented that Washington "has the will but not the wallet." Will rightly noted that Washington always has plenty of "wallet" and that the problem is instead usually one of finding the will.

This is that.

The money to rebuild "the nation's busiest transit hub" is staring us in the face: the riders. If there are really so many of them (and there are), then spreading the cost of funding a capital account to build a new Penn Station across their fares should be a relatively straightforward — and not particularly burdensome — question of economics and accounting. We (by which I really mean "they" — the riders) have more than enough wallet.

The deficit is of course in the will — by which I mean political will. The people who ride New Jersey Transit, the Long Island Railroad and Amtrak are, as a group, middle class and therefore politically insulated from such an abominable notion as expecting them to pay for their own train station.

The question of offsetting the cost of a new Penn Station by selling land and development rights around the site to real estate firms (and, if so, then how much development, to whom and by what selection process) are all ancillary to the core question: When and why did expecting those who use a train station to be the ones who pay for it, rather than those who don't use it (not to mention those who don't even live or work near it) become The Impossible Dream?

Who Should Pay for Mass Transit? (Part One)

Kip — 2008-03-07T12:03+00:00

Consider the following fact:

New York riders pay a considerably higher share of the cost of mass transit than riders in other cities.

A libertarian would say this makes New York a more just (or less unjust) jurisdiction than its peer cities, since even with a natural monopoly such as mass transit (i.e., that might warrant government provision or at least oversight), the principle still endures that those who use a service, and only those who use it, should pay for it. There is no rational basis, under any system of equity or justice (even anti-libertarian ones) to expect New Yorkers who do not use mass transit, let alone taxpayers outside New York, to subsidize those who do.

(Note that I am referring to taxpayers subsidizing the system. Subsidizing the poor — i.e. by providing fare discounts comparable to food stamps or housing vouchers — is a separate question altogether. Who would dare suggest that lower-income subway non-users should be expected to subsidize higher-income users? Yet that is exactly what subsidizing the system as a whole entails.)

Is anyone surprised, meanwhile, that this fact about "who pays what share" comes from the New York Times editorial pages, not as praise but rather as indictment:

The question is how to find all that cash without sticking up riders again. ... Getting money to help fix mass transit is yet another reason why the City Council and state lawmakers should approve congestion pricing before the end of the month — when a deadline to receive more than $350 million in federal funds expires.
...
To finance its capital plan, the authority is also counting on the by-no-means-certain generosity of the city, state and federal governments. And even then there is still a projected $9 billion budget gap. Unless another source of money is found, the M.T.A. chief executive, Lee Sander, may have to further delay some projects, perhaps the next leg of the Second Avenue subway, to pare costs.

Quick, raise unrelated local taxes or else we lose unrelated federal taxes. And hope that we can find more taxpayer teats to suck on down the ~~road~~ subway track. Because, above all else, tapping into that one "other source of money" that is clearly available — fares that reflect true costs — would be utterly unthinkable.

Utterly.

Such is the state of "progressive" urban planning today.

An Open Letter to Subaru of New York

Kip — 2008-02-24T15:02+00:00

Dear Subaru of New York:

For several weeks now, you have been running, ad nauseum, a series of radio ads touting the superiority of your vehicles during New York winters.

Perhaps your vehicles are indeed superior, in terms of handling in winter conditions, fuel economy, comfort, etc. I neither know nor care.

What I care about is that you end every commercial with the following abomination:

"That's why, in our opinion, Subaru is the official car of New York."

The hypothesis "Subaru is the official car of New York" is a discrete, binary, objective concept. It either is or is not true. There is no room for "opinion." Do, or do not — there is no opine.

"Fuel economy is more important than comfort" is an opinion. "Pink is a stupid color for a car" is an opinion. "People who buy foreign cars are unpatriotic" is an opinion.

"Subaru is the official car of New York" is not, and under no circumstances can ever be, an opinion.

Please change your scripts accordingly. Thank you.

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Of course, what doubtless is occurring here is that either Subaru of New York, or the City of New York, or both, were unwilling to negotiate a marketing agreement in which Subaru would indeed be declared "the official car of New York." Which at first glance seems odd: it's not like New York City has been unwilling to prostitute itself in this manner in the past — and in a far more controversial context than automobiles.

I wonder whether (indeed I strongly suspect that) Subaru reached out to the city and was rebuked, most likely because it's a foreign manufacturer.* It's no coincidence that almost every police car in America is made in America.

(*Subaru has one assembly plant in Indiana, but it is a Japanese company owned in part by Toyota.)

---

Meanwhile:

[A measure] would salute The Colonel's fried chicken as Kentucky's official picnic food.

State Rep. Charles Siler is sponsoring legislation to honor the late Col. Harland Sanders, the Kentuckian who founded the fried chicken chain that now has 11,000 restaurants in more than 80 countries. The bill singles out KFC's "finger lickin' good" original recipe, which Sanders first served in a Corbin restaurant in 1940, for the designation.

The Colonel's fried chicken deserves the title, Siler said, because of the worldwide attention and the economic benefit it has brought to the state. By approving the bill, he said, the legislature would be helping Louisville-based KFC to market the product.

Of course, it is never a proper function of government to help one politically favored company "market the product" (i.e., compete against alternatives). (And KFC's parent company, YUM! Brands, doesn't appear even to have had to pay any rent-seeking to this activist hillbilly legislature. Go figure.)

And what was I just saying about "politically favored"?

The animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals contends, however, that KFC chickens are abused, even tortured.
...
PETA has been involved in a longstanding battle with KFC, and even began a push two years ago to have a bust of Colonel Sanders removed from the Capitol. Sanders became recognizable worldwide after he began marketing his fried chicken.

No doubt the War on Obesity types will also weigh in (no pun intended); cf. this previous post.

(Via Lowering the Bar.)

Sharpton's Bizarre "Right to a Lynch Mob"

Kip — 2008-01-26T14:01+00:00

You may or may not be familiar with the Sean Bell shooting in New York City. Background here.

The relevant facts for our purposes are that two police detectives are charged with manslaughter (a third is charged with reckless endangerment) in connection to a controversial shooting incident in November 2006.

The officers requested a change in venue based on bias in the local jury pool. This is not unusual. The judge denied the motion, as did an appeals court yesterday.

The defendants have as a result waived their Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial. The judge will serve as the trier of fact and will be the one to find the defendants guilty or not guilty.

I won't pretend to know, or be in a position to critique, the defense counsel's reasoning. But I do know the old adage: When the law is on your side, argue the law. When the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When neither the law nor the facts are on your side, play the race card.

Here the "race card" is Al Sharpton:

"I think that it is stunning that these officers want to do everything but be accountable to the people they serve in Queens," Mr. Sharpton said. "Police should be accountable to the people they serve. It is interesting they would be accountable to people in another venue, but in Queens they do not want to face the people."

What exactly is so "stunning" about wanting a fair trial? What is so stunning about worrying that jurors — pulled from a community rife with racial tensions, exacerbated by media whores like Sharpton — might be more interested in vigilantism than in achieving justice?

Go back to the adage: In a trial where the law is on your side, a bench trial can easily be an intelligent strategy — who is more likely to apply the law correctly: a judge or twelve laypersons? It's only when the law is against you, and you have to rely on persuading that the facts happen to vindicate you, that a jury trial likely makes more sense.

A variation of this heuristic, perhaps not relevant here, goes something like this: If you're innocent and you know it, then you're happy with only one bite of the apple. If you're guilty and you know it, then twelve bites at the apple starts to look mighty attractive.

In any case, only a professional race-baiter like Sharpton could possibly pretend that the sacred right to a jury trial belongs not to the defendant, but to the "community" (as represented by him, of course). Only someone utterly contemptuous of justice could imagine a "right to convict" that transcends pesky notions of guilt or innocence.

Regardless of how the Obama campaign pans out, he will at least have provided this public service: catalyzing the banishment of Sharpton and his scurrilous ilk to the dustbin of history.

Activist Legislator Fact of the Day

Kip — 2007-12-31T21:12+00:00

City housing officials acknowledge that they have no hard data on the numbers of cases of harassment between landlords and tenants.

Which, of course, does not stop them from seeking to intervene in what the Washington Post histrionically describes as landlord-tenant "wars" --

"We want to give tenants the power of the law to fight intimidation," said Councilman Daniel Garodnick, one of the sponsors of the first bill, Introduction 627, which has the backing of 34 of the [New York City] council's 51 members. The issue is so contentious that Councilwoman Maria Baez of the Bronx, who introduced the rival bill, Introduction 638, to protect landlords, withdrew her support for it after an angry protest by housing activists outside her office.
...
Representatives of landlords say incidents of harassment are rare. They say that a new law is unnecessary because 10 existing laws deal with similar issues and that the state housing agency has been hearing harassment cases for years.

Are all landlords saints? Surely not. But I wonder which is the more ubiquitous problem: landlords illegally harassing tenants or tenants not paying rent on time (or otherwise violating leases)?

And keep in mind that a significant, perhaps overwhelming, proportion of these harassment allegations (including the false ones that no doubt exist) are in reference to rent-regulated apartments. When the government, by negating property rights, creates a powerful incentive to evict a tenant paying a minuscule fraction of a market rent (the eviction allows the rent to rise at least a bit with the next tenant), then who can claim to be surprised when a handful of landlords cross a line that the government itself created?

Does that excuse harassment or other illegal conduct? No -- two wrongs do not make a right. But let's at least acknowledge that the precedent wrong exists -- and persists -- as a matter of public policy.

---

Meanwhile:

The workers say their wages are trailing inflation and don't reflect the booming value of the office buildings where they clean, run elevators and staff the doors.

The backstory is a pending strike by the Service Employees International Union against the Realty Advisory Board, which represents many, perhaps most, commercial office buildings in Manhattan.

The part of that sentence that is most fascinating (i.e., most frustrating) is the citation to "the booming value of the office buildings." Why should the underlying value of the property matter to the value of the services a janitor provides? Since when do employees have an underlying claim to the value of the property on which they work?

This obfuscation -- best reflected in the insolent attempt by some malcontents to replace the word "stockholder" with the gobbledygook term "stakeholder" -- blanks out the fact that property values reflect entrepreneurship and risk-taking, the return to the factor of production called "ownership," just as wages are the return to the factor of production called "labor."

If workers want to share in the "booming value" of office buildings, then let their unions take equity stakes in the properties. Earn a share in the reward by taking on a share of the risk. After all, wasn't the end goal of socialism always for workers to own the means of production?

Maybe they should actually give it a try sometime -- though they may be surprised by what they learn.

Down to the Future?

Kip — 2007-12-21T12:12+00:00

A comment I left at John Tierney's blog about the increased use of "smart elevators" in newly built skyscrapers such as the New York Times Building:

There are few more depressing sights than my daily walk to work in Midtown Manhattan in which I see, in the Twenty-First Century, traffic cops standing in intersections guiding vehicles in the same way they did in the 1920s and 1930s.

Depressing because, if people were neither stupid nor inconsiderate, then the technology designed to render them obsolete (i.e., traffic lights) would succeed. But all it takes are a few stupid or inconsiderate people and the whole "intelligent" system collapses and we find ourselves needing to revert to "simplicity trumps efficiency."

I have no doubt that the same will be true for "smart" elevators. The title of Mr. Tierney's post ["Smart Elevators, Dumb People"] says it all.

P.S. How successful did "double-decker" elevators such as those at Citigroup Center and the Smith Barney Building in NYC prove to be? My experience in both building has been: "not very."

I also suspect, however, that the ubiquitous presence of traffic cops at lighted intersections in New York City may merely be a police union boondoggle. Is there no escape from my cynicism?

More on Giuliani's Adultery

Kip — 2007-11-29T13:11+00:00

America's ~~Lecher~~ Mayor responds:

Rudy Giuliani dismissed a report Wednesday that he expensed the cost of his security detail to obscure city offices for trips to a Long Island resort as the then-mayor began an extramarital affair with current wife Judith Nathan.

"First of all, it's not true," he said during a GOP debate hours after the story broke. "I had 24-hour security for the eight years that I was mayor. They followed me everyplace I went. It was because there were, you know, threats, threats that I don't generally talk about. Some have become public recently; most of them haven't.

Note the Slick Willy style word play: It is "not true" that he -- active voice -- wrongly allocated expenses to city agencies totally unconnected to mayoral security.

But that was never really the allegation. The Politico report -- which is based on government records and is ironclad and indisputable -- was passive voice: the expenses were wrongly allocated (i.e., by someone). It was not explicitly suggested that Giuliani personally crafted or approved the practice.

And in any case: So what?

Isn't Giuliani emphasizing his "executive experience," especially relative to Hillary Clinton? Well, "executives" deal with issues like this. At least the good ones do.

Also, even if Giuliani were not disingenuous in his wordsmithy denial of the undeniable -- again, so what? Regardless of how the expenses were allocated (or misallocated), since when is it a proper use of taxpayer funds to shuttle a mayor to an adulterous rendezvous? Someone living under 24-hour "threats" might, in the name of wizened "executive" prudence, not only keep his fly zipped but also keep it at home.