Speed and efficiency have never been the hallmarks of the socialist political state. New York's slow and extraordinarily costly shamble in rebuilding the World Trade Center after 9/11, now almost seven years ago, is a typical example of socialist state planning. This fiasco is a model for what so-called progressive liberals, led by Senator Barack Obama, intend for socialized strangulation of the entire economy. In its June 30, 2008, edition, the Wall Street Journal reports:
The rebuilding of the World Trade Center will be pushed back into the next decade and will cost up to $3 billion more than planned. The Port Authority is set to release a report detailing significant delays and cost overruns on construction.
This may be disturbing to taxpayers who foot the bill, but it's really good news for liberal-progressive-socialist politicians, of whom New York State and New York City have an ample supply. As I noted roughly a year ago in World Trade Towers: a Socialist Fiasco:
We can count on government planners to produce the most inefficient projects conceivable by the human mind. Manhattan's Freedom Tower, intended to rise on the site of 9/11 destruction, is an egregious example...
New York City, the nation's most socialistically ingrained municipality, in the nation's premier socialist state, has a long history of public works boon-doggles, of which the Freedom Tower is just the latest.
One of the earliest was the city's efforts in the 1920s to compete with, and to destroy economically, the privately-owned IRT West Side subway lines. The chosen vehicle was Mayor Jimmy Walker's IND subway system (famous, if nothing else, for Duke Ellington's theme song, “Take the A Train"). In the end, both lines were economically unsustainable without city subsidies.
This set in motion the city's take-over of all of the privately owned subway lines and ushered in the era of cronyism between the city's socialistically-inclined politicians and the Transport Workers Union (TWU), founded and led by Mike Quill, an open and proud member of the Communist Party...
The standard government-planning way to do this is to spend the maximum possible amount of public funds, for the longest possible time, and employ the maximum possible number of unionized workers at the highest imaginable wages. This promotes full employment for voters and life-time tenure for politicians holding the benefits slop buckets at the public pig-feeding trough.
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776 http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com
