Listen to Reagan
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

One of the things we did yesterday was go up onto the World Wide Web and listen to President Reagan announcing that he would fire the striking air traffic controllers. The date was August 3, 1981. “I must tell those that fail to report for duty this morning, they are in violation of the law,” he said. “And if they do not report to work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their [jobs] and will be terminated.” The word “jobs” we put in brackets because the recording was scratchy. The point was clear. What struck us was how simple and understated and deeply principled were the president’s remarks.
This is what New Yorkers yearn to hear. The mayor and governor say the transit strike is illegal. No one wants to hear long lectures on the legal niceties. They want the laws to be obeyed and those that broke them to pay the consequences and the trains to be back in service. The mayor and the governor, as the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas points out on the opposing page, don’t have to rely on judges, lawyers, and rhetoric to make this happen. They can fire the MTA workers who refuse to show up for work, and they can start hiring and training replacement workers immediately.
Meantime, they can bring in a private contractors to run the system. Between the many loyal workers who are willing to cross the picket line, MTA management, and some new hires, a basic system of express trains – say, the 4, A, and 7 lines – could be up and running quickly. Some trains are even now running empty through the system to prevent it from seizing up. Anything less leaves the city’s economy and its population in the hands of a Marxist union leader and his political enablers in the Democratic Party and other public service unions.
Hesitation on the part of the governor, the mayor, and the MTA only invites the kinds of spectacles the city was met with yesterday, when two labor leaders – one representing our teachers and the other detectives in charge of enforcing our laws – appeared at a press conference to support an illegal strike. Mayor Bloomberg has, by our lights, shown the greatest appreciation for the principles involved here, saying yesterday, “I don’t know how you’d explain to your kids that if you break the law you get a better deal than if you’re honest.” He can go up on the Web and in a few seconds find himself listening to how The Great Reagan stepped into the American pantheon by acting on the principles the mayor is talking about.