A Good Scolding
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
communism is very seductive.. especially-
when the “means of production” is owned by very few.
One of Thomas Sowell’s aphorisms is that a great deal of damage is done by people whose object is to replace what works with what sounds good. In the case of Mamdani and Cea Weaver, it only sounds good because they have an obscene resentment of people who start and run private businesses and because they have an inflated opinion of themselves but haven’t even a rudimentary understanding of how anything works. (NB, Mamdani’s father and Cea Weaver’s mother and father are college teachers).
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Have a gander and the targets selected by Mamdani and Weaver: landlords and grocery merchants. The grocery business is the most low margin segment of the economy. (The ratio of earnings to revenue is < 0.02). There’s nobody in that business profiteering at the expense of the poor. As for the real estate business, production is exceedingly decentralized. See Wm. Tucker’s portrait of the New York City real estate market ca. 1987. About 75% of landlords owned one building and the largest purveyor of rental real estate in the five boroughs corralled all of 3% of the market. There are some policy measures that might be pursued by local governments in Downstate New York and northern New Jersey which would improve the prospects of impecunious people. One is to scrape away regulatory impediments which inhibit the generation of certain housing types (flop houses, SRO hotels, boarding houses, apartments with shared kitchens, &c); make housing services more bite size. Another is to reduce or eliminate property tax levies on the most impecunious block groups in the metropolitan settlement. Another is to streamline eviction procedures; it takes about twice as long to implement an eviction in New York as it does in Florida. Another is to allow landlords plenary discretion over to whom they rent. Another is to improve the quality of public spaces via vigorous law enforcement. Another is to improve the function of inner city schools by sequestering the incorrigibles in day detention centers run by the police. None of these measures would ever occur to Mamdani or Weaver. They benefit ordinary people, not regime pets like street criminals.