Reinventing New York

The TYPICAL New York politician, Democrat or Republican, gives polite lip service to privatization, school choice, deregulation, and other non-bureaucratic means of delivering services. Other states experiment; the Empire State raises taxes, drives out business, and suffers a disproportionate share of the nation's unemployment.

But even New York cannot isolate itself from fresh ideas forever, as witness a conference on New York City government recently sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy group, and the Citizens Union, a liberal group. The session made two things unmistakably clear: local government is the crucial factor in determining the quality of life, and the present system of top-down governance simply doesn't work.

The panel of journalists, City College professors, school-board members, and former city politicos reached a consensus far closer to the new paradigms of Jack Kemp and Jim Pinkerton than to the moribund old ones of Mario Cuomo and David Dinkins. In education, for example, participants held out no hope for improvement so long as the only "choices" were those made by the five-thousand-man central administration. Zoning deregulation would alleviate homelessness far more effectively than public shelters in a city where, not so long ago, private contractors built 100,000 unsubsidized dwellings each year. New York's Medicaid program is needlessly expensive, costing three times more per patient than the market-driven ones in other states.

The conferees didn't emerge unscathed, however. Some members of the audience questioned how the lily-white, all-male panel could presume to know what's right for the blacks, Hispanics, and Asians who now make up more than half the city. If you can't attack the message, attack the messenger.

COPYRIGHT 1992 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning