Hurricane Sandy and the Failures of Blue-Statism

Link to the failures here at WSJ.

Mr. Mead was writing in reference to the hell that our inner cities have become for many African-Americans. But the failure is larger than that, because so many of the government agencies that citizens depend on have morphed into jobs programs, where pensions take priority over performance. Compare, for example, the response of Verizon—which within 24 hours of Sandy's landfall had 95% of its cell service up and running in affected areas—with the glaring lack of hard information from the government for people shivering in cold homes without power.

In their own ways, Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama embody the obsessions of modern liberalism. Each holds an advanced Ivy League degree. Each believes he would make better choices for others than they could make for themselves. Each has consequently eschewed the gradual and the modest—the unglamorous improvements that might have better prepared, say, Staten Island, for a dangerous storm. These leaders prefer instead the shiny and large, whether it is Mr. Bloomberg's huge and costly 2nd Avenue subway project or Mr. Obama's $860 billion federal stimulus.

Meanwhile, what do we get from blue-state liberalism? In New York we get a mayor who makes war on Big Gulp sodas while proving himself inept at basic government functions such as clearing snow. At the national level, we get a president who vows to help the victims of Hurricane Sandy even though some might not be without power if regulators in Washington and New York hadn't been making the environment so hostile to new investment.

And then a bit of regional color:

Chapman University fellow in urban futures Joel Kotkin spends a great deal of time looking at which communities deliver and which do not, and he says it need not be a partisan issue. He cites Sioux Falls, S.D., which has a Democratic mayor in a sea of Republicans—and a fine new water-development system. Or Galveston, Texas, which maintains a huge seawall to avoid the kind of hurricane damage that killed 6,000 people back in 1900. Much of the nation's best new infrastructure, he says—roads, bridges, airports, ports—has been built in "red" cities on the Gulf Coast and Great Plains with bipartisan support. [Fly-over country.]

By contrast, he is astounded by the kind of liberalism he sees in his adopted state of California and his native New York, where a mayor who jets down to his mansion in the Bahamas on weekends tells working- and middle-class New Yorkers that they really shouldn't be driving to work or living in single-family homes. "In many ways," Mr. Kotkin says, "liberalism is increasingly big brother meets blue nose."

Please go to the link for the full op-ed piece. Really good writing regardless of one's worldview.