Before the bureaucrats and the federal government entered the picture, New York City offered good public schools and what essentially amounted to free health care. Many employers did not offer health insurance and doctors weren’t that rich, but if you were poor and sick, medical assistance was available. Oh — and Johnny could read.

When I was 7, I was operated on at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital in Spanish Harlem for a burst appendix. A year later, I had a tonsillectomy at the same hospital and my family was never charged for these procedures because we were considered indigent. We were not on welfare or home relief, but hospitals then had programs, subsidized by private donations, to provide care for those unable to pay. The city had numerous health stations where residents received all the required vaccinations and preventive health care.

We even had our teeth looked after. Every Wednesday, a school bus would transport students from my parochial school on East 111th Street to the Guggenheim Dental Clinic on 72nd Street for checkups and simple fillings. True, novocaine was not an option, but compare this basic service to that available in Britain and one can appreciate how the stereotype of poor British teeth began.

I always remember Sister Anna Mercedes warning us at Cathedral High School for Girls that the national health care then being proposed in Congress would be a disaster. It amounts to socialism, which is a system that just does not work in a free society, she said, and the years have proved her prescient.

Before government programs like Medicare and Medicaid offered blanket coverage to those in certain income brackets, doctor office visits were as low as $10. Afterwards, Sutton Place and Park Avenue physicians started accepting indigent patients with this coverage and — Voila! — taxes went up and up. I can remember when there was no such thing as a New York City personal income tax. New Yorkers are the most taxed in the nation and if you don’t believe that check what’s on your phone bill, cable bill, utility bill, and notice all the sneaky supplementals; franchise fees, and special charges.

Whenever I hear a politician campaign against tax breaks for the rich, I wish someone would stand up and shout — “What’s wrong with that? When you tax the rich, they stop investing and spending, and take their money elsewhere. Give them tax relief and — Voila again! — jobs!”

One of the reasons I voted for Michael Bloomberg in 2001 was because I was under the impression that, as a successful businessman, he understood this simple formula and was not a tax-and-spend bureaucrat. Wrong! My property taxes immediately went up 18% and, even though the city now has a surplus, I’ll bet that tax hike is permanent.

But the most ridiculous proposal this administration has ever made is paying the poor to do what’s right. Mr. Bloomberg’s Department of Education plans to pay poor kids to get higher grades: If they take tests and they pass, the city will pay them. The plan gets even worse by offering to pay their parents for getting their children library cards and to meet with the children’s teachers. It will even pay them if their children have good attendance records.

What an insult this is to the poor — only those totally removed from their acquaintance would even suggest such a slap in the face.

The much-esteemed Diane Ravitch is a historian of education at New York University, a senior fellow at the Brookings and Hoover Institutes, and a regular blogger at the Huffington Post. I couldn’t agree more with a recent post in which she writes, “This plan is insulting to poor kids and poor families. It assumes that they won’t do the right thing for themselves unless the government pays them to do it. It demeans the poor parents who do meet their children’s teachers; who do have library cards; who do care desperately about their children’s schooling.

“This plan, moreover, is unethical and immoral,” she continues. “It makes the basest possible assumptions about human behavior and acts on the Behaviorist view that people are motivated only by hard cash . . . The plan destroys any hope of teaching the value of intrinsic motivation, or the rewards of deferred gratification, or the importance of self-discipline for a distant but valued goal.”

I would like to suggest that the mayor and Chancellor Klein visit an inner city parochial school and watch the students fall in love with the learning process. A good teacher is supposed to be the matchmaker of that lifelong love affair — not a pimp.