Myron Magnet on The Obsolete New York Model at City Journal. One quote:
Struggling under the accumulated burden of eight decades of “progressive” government, we New Yorkers can serve as a warning to our fellow Americans as President Obama, following the New Deal playbook, seeks to use the current financial crisis to provide a new rationale and legitimacy for the gargantuan machinery of the federal government. Our economic ills, the president contends, require expanding the welfare state to include the majority of Americans not just in Medicare and Social Security but also in government-subsidized and -controlled health care and higher education—all paid for by an ever smaller percentage of the citizens, in the name of European-style redistributionist “fairness.” Logically, this plan is a non sequitur (in the process of turning, by constant repetition, into a Big Lie), since health care and education have nothing to do with the causes or cure of our present economic woes. But logic aside, consider New York’s government-controlled services and ask if they are worth taking to nationwide scale. Take a good look at the president’s tax plans, too, which will end up with many more Americans paying nothing and many fewer paying most of the bills. Once the tax eaters outnumber the taxpayers and can vote themselves an income, you have arrived at elective despotism.
