Submitted by Mitchell Langbert, Dec 13, 2006 11:11

Mayor Bloomberg's ideas are stale. Edward Glaeser is on the money. New York reached its apex in the 1920s after two centuries of laissez faire, In the late 1920s and onward the City became the locus of large-scale urban planning, building of highways, public works, the world center for innovative parks design, ever-escalating regulation and welfare transfers and hostility to business. The result of all the urban renewal was that in 1974 the city nearly went bankrupt (saved only by the principle that an institution that's too big cannot be allowed to go bankrupt). Since the urban renewal boom of the 1940s and 1950s, the city has hardly grown, industry has fled and the erstwhile center of innovation in business and technology has been left with a shell of its former industry, chiefly in the form of finance. The nation's solution to this trend, heralded by New York Governor-elect Eliot has been to significantly increase regulation of financial disclosure, reducing demand for Wall Street's services.

Mayor Bloomberg has spent the last five years doing little about the bloat in New York City's government, the poor services, the poor subways, the high taxes, the excessive regulation and the city's anti-business psychology, reinforced by a left-dominated public school system. Now, he proposes a plan to improve New York's economy by building public works.

Didn't they teach history at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Business School? Shouldn't a plan as dumb as Mayor Bloomberg's embarrass us that our government is this incompetent and uninformed, this unaware of the past and this indifferent to developing a realistic plan for our future. What a tragedy, that a city that claims to be a center for human capital can be so ignorant about its past and inept in designing its future.

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