The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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to another area, even if the objective is his own happiness and the general productivity. But one wonders whether it is not shortsighted of those who, in deference to the inertial logic that people should stay where they are, appear to refuse to probe the alternative that they might be better off elsewhere than in New York City, with its inhuman living conditions, its 200,000 unemployed, and its 500,000 on relief. The case might be made, however paradoxical it may sound, that although New York should not positively discourage immigration, at least it should positively encourage emigration.
This isn’t the moment to speculate on means by which private and public agencies might either encourage unemployed West Virginian coal-miners to retrain for jobs elsewhere, or, compassionately, discourage people from coming to New York to be poor. I touched, in the course of the campaign, on the theme that New York was thoughtlessly concerned with its size, and intended to probe the question whether an inverted kind of subsidy, to middle and big business, was, in fact, going on under our eleemosynary noses—by our encouraging, with social welfare schemes, a cheap labor market. I never got around to it, in part because of the lack of time, in part because, of course, it would not, in the hurly burly, have been publicly pondered. It is worth noting, however, that it costs the City of New York more money to sustain a great many of its employed workers—in schooling for their children, in free hospital care, in subsidized housing, etc.—than those workers produce; that we have going, then, a strange kind of subsidy which might be understandable if the workers were themselves the beneficiaries, but is less so when third parties who pay substantial dividends to their stockholders might be shown to be the beneficiaries. On the one hand, General Electric in New York will not pay a janitor as much money as the janitor needs in order to bring up his family; and on the other hand, the structure of taxes and social services contrives to put the janitor at the disposal of General Electric. The effect is to permit GE to underbid even the iron law of wages—by paying even less than those straitened wages which Marx predicted the capitalist community would inevitably end up paying—i.e., just enough to keep the workers alive. General Electric, of course, pays heavy taxes, in about as many directions as its light bulbs throw out rays. It would require the services of a first-rate economic sleuth to figure out exactly who is subsidizing whom. But the existing economic tangle is at least one of the results of the crazy situations encouraged by impenetrable social accounting practices and by the proliferation of “free” services whose residual beneficiaries are as difficult to track down as Hetty Green’s. And one of whose side effects is to encourage unnatural movements of the population; and the crisis of the cities.
I touched on the theme, as I say, early in the campaign. I was speaking in the Bronx at a Party Rally:
I have been wondering about New York City’s unthinking obsession with Size. We are expected to work ourselves up into a great lather any time we learn that the population of New York City has shrunk, as the 1960 census showed it had done, rather than grown. I wonder why this should be so. If this were a compassionate reason to take pride in the growth of the city, that is one thing. But surely we are not entitled to feel that we can take pride in the growth of the city in the sense, let us say, that the Maryknollers can take pride in the growth of a mission in Latin America, or Africa. A growth in the population of New York City is hardly to be considered a growth in the parish of the evangelized.
New York should always be prepared to do emergency duty, to act as a haven for the politically oppressed; to do, subject to our raw capacity, what we can for refugees, even as we have done in the past. But there is no such stream crowding in at our gates. New York is not Hong Kong, which feels the moral burden of admitting people by the hundreds of thousands in order to save them from persecution and even death.
If, then, we cannot take any spiritual satisfaction from the number of people who live in New York City, is it for material reasons that we encourage them to come in? Is it the kind of growth that is rationally welcomed by the New York Chamber of Commerce?
Why should it be? Just as it is safe to say that people do not come to New York for the same kind of reason that they go to Lourdes, it should be safe to say that they do not come to New York because New York is an Emerald City. There are emeralds in New York, but they are very scarce; and available only to the very few who combine a happy mixture of skill and good luck. Many people come to New York because they are deluded, at least momentarily, into believing the myth of New York’s munificent opportunities. And, indeed, New York’s improvident policies encourage some people to stay in New York who would be better off to return from whence they came, where job opportunities are better, living conditions more spacious, and the temptations to crime and vice less alluring.
But many people stay in New York, at New York’s expense, for reasons of their own which are only dimly understandable; for reasons, from New York City’s point of view, which are utterly inexplicable. The half-million-plus people in New York City who are unemployed and/or on relief do not contribute anything tangible to the city’s welfare. What is the point in encouraging them to stay, when they might go elsewhere, where employment opportunities are greater, the cost of living less, living conditions better? Why that false sense of civic pride that automatically assumes that New York City is only better off for so long as it continues to grow bigger? What is the argument, and what are its bases, that holds that New York is better off now than it would be with several hundred thousand fewer people living here, whose absence would relieve the congestion in housing, ease the unemployment figures, diminish the welfare rolls, reduce the general demoralization that is attendant on idleness, trim back the crime rate?
I appear before you as the only candidate for Mayor of New York who has not a word to say in defense of the proposition that New York ought to stay as big as it is, let alone grow bigger. I ask, Why? Leave aside all the other arguments, is there an economic argument in defense of this shibboleth? There are 500,000 people on relief in New York today. What do they contribute—I reduce the argument now to purely material terms—what do they contribute materially to New York? It costs a minimum of $700 to furnish public school education for a child in New York. It costs about $500 per year per person for those on relief; and that much again for public housing. What is the residual benefit to New Yorkers of the sacrifices they endure in order to attract to the city men, women, and children who, in this city—as distinguished from elsewhere—are unemployable, and become structural welfarists? Do we easily justify, in our consciences, luring them into New York by the promise of easy welfare payments? That was the lure of such of our politicians as Vito Marcantonio—and, having got their vote, the politicians let them institutionalize themselves as social derelicts, at liberty to breed children who, suffering from inherited disadvantages, alternatively seek surcease in hyperstimulation—in crime and narcotics—and in indolence—as school dropouts or as poolhall conscientious objectors to work; giving that jaded tone to the city which we recognize as among the most considerable obstacles to its liberation.
I recall a happy event of the campaign, a meeting with Mr. Theodore White, a brilliant man, an irresistible writer, and a super-engaging human being. His standard in approaching people personally—as distinguished from writing about them at second hand—has become whether he has reason “to suppose that they were men of good will,”33 in which classification (he subsequently wrote to me), he presumed to place me, and hoped that I, having met him, returned the judgment—which I most emphatically do, however puzzled I continue to be by the absence of any sense of shared oppressors. All of which is an aside, the point being that he appeared to be much taken—as by nothing else, I hasten to absolve him—by what I had to say concerning the unnatural size of New York City. He found it an arresting observation, worth serious thought. He did upend me, I remember, by proffering the suggestion that, however radical I thought my observation to be, he had a better one: oughtn’t New York City to petition to become an independent and sovereign state? I gulped, and quite lost my cool, dismissing his proposal with insufficient reflection, even though I confess to have found the time to smile at the ironic conjunction of proposals made half seriously by Theodore White and altogether in fun by Barry Goldwater. Never mind, he soothed me, he had asked both Lindsay and Beame the same question, and they too had bugged out: which is understandable, considering that Messrs. Lindsay and Beame were running for Mayor of New York, not for President of a new republic. We had other matters to go over (Mr. White was preparing