Here is a link to the full editorial, Please, New Yorkers, just let it slide! We’re masking ourselves into fits, published in the New York Post on March 8, 2022. Below are quotes from the editorial, followed by my analysis. Embedded links within the quotes are retained from the original.
Continue reading “Public masking as a symbol of obedience: a philosophic analysis of Peter J. Pitts’ editorial “Please, New Yorkers, just let it slide! We’re masking ourselves into fits””My testimony at the 2020 NYS Senate Manhattan State Budget Forum
Here’s the 2-minute oral testimony I gave at the 2020 NYS Senate Manhattan State Budget Forum to Senators Robert Jackson, Liz Krueger, Brian Benjamin, Brad Hoylman, Brian Kavanagh, and Jose Serrano regarding the various bills they are currently supporting that would reclassify many or all current independent contractors as employers or employees. (All were present except for Senator Jackson, who left before I spoke.)
Continue reading “My testimony at the 2020 NYS Senate Manhattan State Budget Forum”Customer Satisfaction: New York subway vs. Uber
Re: MTA has more happy riders — but still lags behind D.C., Chicago:
Only a government monopoly such as the MTA could brag about an “almost” 50% customer satisfaction rate.
And yet no one is willing to ask the most obvious of questions: why should the government, which is a coercive monopoly by its very nature, be involved in the transportation business at all? Why shouldn’t our filthy, crumbling, rat-infested, utterly unreliable subway system be sold off to a private entity to take over, modernize, and run efficiently and cost-effectively? And why should New York City and New York State be allowed to cripple, with unending and ever-increasing fees and regulations, the competitiveness of private ride-sharing companies like Uber that have a 97% customer satisfaction rate?
Failing Freelancers (Published in New York Post)
California’s independent contractors’ legislation does not “protect gig-economy workers,” nor does it “guarantee rights to workers.” (“Freelancers law making waves in New York,” Dec. 20).
On the contrary, it violates the fundamental right of employers and employees to contract freely under whatever terms they mutually judge to reflect their self-interest. As a result, it restricts choices, destroys opportunities, increases costs, lowers the standard of living and will ultimately destroy lives and livelihoods as it inevitably spreads from car services to musicians, photographers, writers and all other independent contractors whose very fragile livelihoods depend entirely on the right to contract freely with their employers and clients. Keep this destructive legislation out of New York.
Politics and Principles (published in the New York Post)
That Mayor Bloomberg believes that “tax policy is the way government uses capitalism… to encourage the right behavior” is shocking. It belies a fundamental ignorance of capitalism while revealing the mindset of a dictator.
Capitalism is the system wherein the government exists solely to protect the right of the individual citizen to make his own choices based on his own judgment, so long as he abstains from violating the equal rights of others. A dictatorship, by contrast, is the system wherein the government forces the individual citizen to follow the judgment of a single political leader.
Of course, we don’t yet live under a dictatorship or anything near one. What we live under is a mixed economy, i.e., a mixture of capitalism and statism that is currently drifting towards the latter. In this context, the brazen assertion that the purpose of taxes is to influence behavior, rather finance government, represents yet another principled step away from our country’s founding principles.
Under capitalism, a political leader is not endowed with superior wisdom and the right to enforce it on the citizenry through tax policy, law, or any other means. Not in theory, not in fact, and not in a country founded on the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Shackling Businessmen/Taxing Customers
The $27 million in restaurant fines that the Health Department expects to collect this year is essentially a transfer of wealth from the patrons of those establishments to the city government. This to support a regulatory agency that gives passing inspections to rat-infested restaurants while fining clean restaurants $200 to $2000 for such “crimes” as cooking a whole turkey.
Dismantling all of New York’s unnecessary and incompetent regulatory agencies, beginning with the Health Department, would remove the shackles off of businessmen while putting hundreds of millions of dollars back into the pockets of their customers.