The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
Читать онлайн книгу.
husbandry. It has not proved that way, however strongly economy is emphasized by the challenger, whether he is Franklin Roosevelt calling for a balanced budget, Dwight Eisenhower calling for a reduction in the bureaucracy, or Lyndon Johnson decreeing that the unused light at the White House be snuffed out. The probabilities are small that the cost of any modern government will reduce; which puts the onus on the private sector to generate additional revenues, and ends us up back with the question: Is the scarcity of public funds the major problem?
It was my contention during the campaign that the money shortage was not at the root of all evil; that although there are problems in New York, in other cities, and in the United States, which cannot be solved except by the expenditure of public money, there are problems in New York—and elsewhere—that cannot be solved through the expenditure of public money. But every one of these problems called for an approach highly unpalatable to somebody; and somebody, in an advanced democratic society, tends, unless he has been horribly forsaken, to be a vested interest, whose good favor is either essential to a successful political campaign or, at any rate, thought to be essential to a successful political campaign. I tried to make the point that catering to more and more private interests, under the competitive pressures of democratic elections, tends to elevate to politically preferred positions as many private interests as do not, by their elevation, alienate the more powerful private interests. And that what then happens is that—as I put it to the Washington Press Club—the marginal disutility of bloc satisfaction sets in; whereat the opportunity arises to speak directly to the apparently indulged bloc voter, and suggest an avenue for his escape, hoping to be able to make the demonstration that even by the application of strict utilitarian logic he is better off surrendering his synthetic political advantages in favor of the superior blessings that would then shower down on him.
I proceeded to do so. As it is elsewhere recorded, Mr. Lindsay won the election.
2. New York Is Not Hong Kong 2. New York Is Not Hong Kong
If we accept such categorical indictments of New York as Richard Whalen’s, quoted above, we should certainly ask why the free market hasn’t asserted itself to drain the city of its population. Or ask, at least, whether we have unconsciously accepted the proposition that rather than endure emigration, urban residents will be progressively bribed to stay where they are. In the postwar years, hundreds of thousands of men, rich and poor, skilled and unskilled, fled East Berlin to go to the West, resulting finally in the erection of a Great Wall to stanch the costly and humiliating flow. It is no one’s contention, of course, that New York is East Berlin; on the other hand, those who leave New York need not, in order to do so, make such sacrifices as are made by those who, leaving East Berlin, have left their families, their friends, and whatever goods they had accumulated. The United States, as we all know, is a highly transient country—an incredible twenty per cent of the population changing its address every year. To pick up and go requires, of course, that there be some place to go to. There are places to go to, outside New York. Places where there are more jobs, where housing is cheaper, the crime rate lower, the traffic less congested, the air cleaner, schooling better. Then, too, there are places outside New York where, by the testimony of those who have described the relative hardships, it is less miserable to be poor—where, for instance, one can, for the same amount of money, escape life in the rat-infested tenement. To what extent is the existence of spurned alternatives testimony (a) to the net desirability of living in New York, even after accounting for the special pains and annoyances of life there? To what extent (b) is New York, for mysterious ecological reasons, a kind of major dumping ground toward which the inertial forces of despair tend to propel the loose and the restless who, having come there, huddle down and will not go away, no matter what the attendant miseries of their new life, because by now they are spiritually exhausted? To what extent (c) is mobility simply a factor of wealth?
The very rich, it appears, do not feel the pressure to leave New York because except for occasional interruptions—a sneak-thief, a mugger, a murderer—they can afford to insulate themselves from the major inconveniences. To be sure, they must breathe the common air and strangle in the same traffic jams. But they do not need to use the subway, or live in crowded conditions, or use the public schools. That class of people is in absolute terms tiny, in relative terms large, because New York has a high concentration of very rich people. Mr. Richard Whalen tells us that, asking around, he came up with the figure of three thousand dollars per month after taxes (!) to finance that kind of life: a big apartment in a highly habitable area of Manhattan; private schools for the children; vacations, maybe some sort of cottage in the country.
There is movement from the middle class out of New York. The suburbs grew by 40 per cent during a period (1950–1960) when New York City’s population diminished by 10,000. The principal complaint of middle-class emigrants from New York, by various accounts, is the public schools, which, the famous exceptions aside, are academically backward, unruly, and, increasingly, the arenas for interracial experiments which, at least over the short run, bring dislocative social and intellectual consequences. (The white population of Manhattan schools was 62 per cent in 1958; 51 per cent in 1963.) The next complaint is living space—New York, it is not widely known, actually had, in 1960, more living space per inhabitant than in 1940 (between 1941 and 1961 housing units increased by about 400,000, while the population during that period increased by less than 350,000). But by 1960 more people desired, if they could possibly afford to do so, to stretch out a little bit, and so began to flock to areas where they could do this at the same cost that would be required in New York City, or even less. And, third, there is the much-discussed dissatisfaction with the business climate. (The cost of city government rose 138 per cent between 1954 and 1965 [during the Wagner administration], while average income rose by 46 per cent.)
According to the data, over 800,000 white people left New York between 1950 and 1960, during which period the Negro and Puerto Rican population in New York increased by almost the identical figure. Of those 800,000-plus, many of the breadwinners continue to come into New York to work, and thereby, of course, contribute to New York City’s revenues through taxes paid to the State of New York, a portion of which is remitted to the city, and through old-age retirement taxes, and excise taxes on whatever they purchase while in New York.
Among the lowest income groups, which arbitrarily (though not unreasonably) one might define as those families whose income is four thousand dollars per year or less,22 the emigration is considerably less than the national average—even though unemployment in New York is above the national average. In 1960, the unemployment figure among Negroes was 11 per cent; in New York, it was 14 per cent. Among the general population, 6½ per cent were unemployed. In New York (the figures differ) it was, by all accounts, higher.
The (private) New York Community Council’s Budget Standard Service sets $6,400 per year as the acceptable income for a family of four. The median income of New York’s white population is $6,600; of the nonwhite population, $4,440.
One wonders about the extent to which free-market pressures continue to be culturally relevant to the distribution of human beings. I do not remember just when the principle that natural economic pressures ought to bear on the movements of the population was formally abandoned by social theorists, but somewhere along the line it seems to have been. It used to be taken for granted that if in one place there is overcrowding, unemployment, obloquy, whereas somewhere else there is room and work, and there is no barbed wire between place A and place B, there is sufficient reason for a flow of people from the one to the other locality. I remember a photograph in Life of Senator John Kennedy, campaigning in West Virginia in the spring of 1960 for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He was talking to a miner who, the caption revealed, had worked a cumulative total of three years out of the preceding twenty, and was now, with Life as his witness, receiving from the future President the pledge that he would be looked after by special legislation under the forthcoming dispensation: that he would, in effect, be paid not to mine coal for a living. There are any number of arguments, and I am acquainted with them—having to do with absent skills, with family ties, with other tangibles and intangibles—that