Interesting how this AP story makes it seem like Chicago’s 2009 city budget is really cutting costs and streamlined.
Aldermen have approved Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s $6.2 billion budget amid worries over the economy.
The budget, approved 49-1 on Wednesday, calls for as many as 635 layoffs, selling city assets and new fees and taxes.
It requires the hiring of fewer police officers, but stipulates that no officers or firefighters will lose their jobs. The city also won’t fill 1,600 vacant positions.
My guess is dishonesty on the part of the city and journalistic laziness on the part of the AP.
Still, one alderman – my old one, in fact – voted against it. Hot damn! Was it because the alderman in question pierced through the charade, the misrepresentation, and wanted to stand up for the taxpayer? No. No, he was protesting the severity of the “cuts”.
Alderman Billy Ocasio cast the lone dissenting vote. He says most of the layoffs affect “people who do the work and get paid the least.”
An excerpt from George Will’s latest Newsweek article, entitled Pencils and Politics:
Capitalism…is a profit and loss system. Corfam—Du Pont’s fake leather that made awful shoes in the 1960s—and the Edsel quickly vanished. “[T]he post office and ethanol subsidies and agricultural price supports and mediocre public schools live forever.” They are insulated from market forces; they are created, in defiance of those forces, by government, which can disregard prices, which means disregarding the rational allocation of resources. To disrupt markets is to tamper with the unseen source of the harmony that is all around us.
The spontaneous emergence of social cooperation—the emergence of a system vastly more complex, responsive and efficient than any government could organize—is not universally acknowledged or appreciated. It discomforts a certain political sensibility, the one that exaggerates the importance of government and the competence of the political class.
A week or so ago, I was watching Chicago Tonight, specifically a piece on Sikia, a brand new, 11-day old “fine-dining” restaurant in Chicago’s impoverished (and often dangerous) Englewood neighborhood.
“Fine-dining” in Englewood? My immediate reaction…one of suspicion. Political suspicion. I mean, I don’t doubt that the restaurant is amazing and the food is excellent. It’s the location.
There’s a reason why people have reacted with statements like “I can’t believe it’s in Englewood“. People can’t believe it’s in Englewood because, really, there’s no economic reason for such an establishment to organically pop up in Englewood. In the last ten years, Englewood has experienced more than 700 murders (within a population of roughly 40,000). And 43% of that population live below the poverty level.
So Q: What sensible businessman would open a “fine-dining” restaurant in such an incongruent environment? (Attention hyper-sensitive PC crowd: not saying that residents of Englewood are unworthy of “fine-dining”…I simply question Sikia’s market potential given the the high crime rate and limited disposable income.)
The answer is that a business, in all likelihood, would not open something like Sikia in Englewood. Considering the investment, it’s just too risky. But a government-subsidized culinary school with an unlimited – yes, unlimited (see below)- supply of taxpayer funding? Bingo! Risk is no longer a factor.
Sikia is the facility of Washburne Culinary Institute, a school housed at the very new and very expensive Kennedy-King College campus (63rd and Halstead). It’s purpose is respectable enough: to provide Washburne students with industry experience and showcase their talents. The Trib calls the concept “innovative”. Ostensibly, I agree.
But Sikia wouldn’t exist without the gross financial irresponsibility (and, consequently, taxpayer slap-in-the-face) that lies at its base. Follow the connection. Sikia is the product of Washburne Culinary Institute and Washburne Culinary Institute is directly affiliated with Kennedy-King College, housed at the new Kennedy-King campus. This campus, for those of you unaware, opened years behind schedule and $62,000,000 over budget – yes, that’s 62 million dollars! – in July of 2007. Mayor Daley deflected criticism over last year’s boondoggle with the following statement (see video here [exact quote at 3:22]):
But again, when you say it cost overrun, you know what the thing that bothers me? It’s alright in the suburban area to build quality education facilities. But when it comes to Chicago it seems the media always talks about cost overrun. There’s no cost overrun when you put the best for a facility like this at Kennedy King. I have no problems justifying any cost overruns in regards to any program for Kennedy King or city colleges or board of education because you want to build the finest. And that’s what some people said, ‘Let’s not build the best for Washburne. Let’s make it the second or third best.’ Why? [emphasis mine]
Ugh, you heard it. The very concept, the very notion, of “cost overrun” doesn’t exist for the Mayor. Not when you “want to build the finest”. Of course, “the finest” in education happens to involve $62 million worth of waste, excess, negligence and/or fraud. Migraine forthcoming…
“Sikia is symbolic of peace and harmony and depicts two fish biting each other’s tail with the message that “no one should bite the other”.
How ironic that, figuratively speaking, Sikia is bitting the other in the relationship, the taxpayer. I don’t know how else to put it: Sikia is a product of the flagrantly inefficient and demonstrably reckless philosophy that guides the Mayor (and his cronies’) taxpayer-funded educational investments. No matter how “innovative” the program, this place stinks. Plain stinks. I mean, locating the facility in Englewood and making it “fine-dining” – it’s as if the decision-makers don’t even want the restaurant to get out of the red.
What’s more, Mayor Daley appears to be proud of his ability to keep such a system going. He boasts with triumphant self-importance cloaked as public gratitude (see video here [exact quote at 4:24])::
Education is the answer to all the ills of society. And that’s why I want to thank the taxpayers – you are the taxpayers in Englewood, you are the taxpayers in Chicago – for helping the board of education and City of Colleges. We did not wait for state government. We did not wait for federal government. If we did, we’d be still out on the streets walking around waiting for another answer or waiting for money. We in Chicago get things done because it’s a priority of getting things done. It’s not a dream; it’s a reality.
Wow. It’s like anti-inspire. Cologne coming to a (subsidized) store near you!
Whenever I hear the term “social justice”, I think of a direct and necessary absence of individual justice. It’s a sick visceral reaction to a sick erroneous concept.
On the subject, Rhode Island’s free market think tank, the Ocean State Policy Research Institute, wrote one of the best op-eds I’ve read in the last month or so. Entitled Freedom is the Cost of Social Justice, I’ll excerpt it liberally:
Ayn Rand once said that the difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time. It appears that that time is now in many parts of the world. London decides who is worthy of [health] care and Canada holds its market captive like America holds the poor in public schools. Oppression sells its wares under the guise of “social justice” that demands that state’s safety net instead become society’s fabric. Once people become dependent, individual freedom is lost.
So, when Governor Caricieri announced that some of our tax dollars would be used to discourage out of wedlock childbirths and promote marriage, the reception was less than homey. Government isn’t supposed to help people make choices, it is simply supposed to write them checks.
But for those of us who truly relish freedom – this is indeed a perplexing situation. It is beyond debate that two biological parents is the preferred environment for a child. But does government have the authority to influence lifestyle, or, dare I say, “moral” choices? The governor’s response was the only logical statement anyone might accept: ‘if taxpayers must pay for other people’s lifestyle choices, we have the right to influence those choices.’
In a market driven social service world, people put their money with groups representing the values they support. Secular or not, donations were a way for people to “make the world a better place” in a manner these donors found worthy. But it’s not like that anymore, at least not in RI.
Rhode Islanders like to say they are compassionate, but that compassion isn’t voluntary. In 2005 the Catalog of Philanthropy released a report called the Generosity Index that ranked states on their “giving.” Rhode Island ranked second lowest in the nation on the amount of money donated to charity according to itemized deductions. During that same year, RI spending on public assistance programs was the third highest in the country. And this is nothing new. Our “giving rank” from 1997 to 2004 (most recent year reported) was either 49th or 50th.
So now that we have developed a system that dictates a high level of government enforced charity, whose morals will we use to administer it? Even if the proceeds are derived by coercion and government charity is given without condition, this itself is a value system that sends serious economic and moral signals. Rather than representing the absence of judgment, the evaporation of stigma within our politically-correct, amoral government welfare state is a choice of values….
Society can strike a balance between the Scarlet Letter and Murphy Brown. It is far better that this dynamic process takes place without the fear the government will pick the winner. Instead competing value systems can exist simultaneously and their successes and failures can inform one another. The best deal we can possibly hope for is for government to recede a bit, making space for private action to strengthen the fabric of society with the safety net remaining just that. But if society does continue government administered charity, you must accept a little totalitarianism. Me, I prefer freedomism.
Anyways, on my way to work today, I had my Zune on shuffle – take that Apple! – and came across a sweet bit from comedian Doug Stanhope. Totally reminded me of George Carlin sans, of course, the lefty political bent.
At baggage claim there are multiple signs (see below) warning travelers of “illegal operators”, that one ought to “refuse offers for transportation” from these individuals.
Never having seen anything like this before, I get the idea that Houston has a problem with taxi-disguised kidnappers or something.
I mean, the signs say “DON’T BE A VICTIM!” and “BE SAFE”. What else am I to infer? That the “illegal operators”, the victimizing “violators”, are simply unlicensed taxi drivers? That’s it!?
Yep, that’s it.
Also known as “gypsy cabs”, these guys can be found anywhere there’s an artificial taxi shortage, and thereby, anywhere — as John Hood described in this ancient 1989 Freeman article — “the government has prevented supply to rise to meet growing demand”.
As unregulated entities, they don’t have set-prices, so passengers and drivers just negotiate the fare at the beginning. Don’t like the price? Just walk out of the cab. More often than not, it’s cheaper than the licensed rate. Furthermore, while most taxis prefer to hover around well-to-do areas, gypsy cabs will service poorer neighborhoods.
Taking everything into account, it’s hardly something to be alarmed about…As Wikipedia states, “passengers sometimes find illegal cabs to be more available, convenient, or economical than licensed ones.”
Of course, the free market would naturally do this–to an even greater, more efficient, more affordable degree (imagine mounted signs on top of taxi roofs displaying prices[awesome!])– if the government would just butt out.
Markets are resilient. Try as they might, government and the special interests they protect can’t completely suppress the forces of competition….Government is fighting a losing battle when it grapples with the discipline of the market. There’s no real mystery about why this is so. Free enterprise is not some fragile, delicate experiment in constant need of protection. It does not have to be imposed or fostered. It is, in short, the natural order of things.
Coercive government, on the other hand, needs constant attention and tinkering. There is no shortage of ways to compete with a regulated monopoly, but there’s only a limited number of ways government can restrict competition. Insulate an industry from competition, and the resulting price hikes and drops in service encourage consumers to substitute other products or services. Frustrated regulators must feel like they’re chasing a greased pig.
More! What up with that?
