Stu Mirsky for NY State Assembly

Stu Mirsky is running for State Assembly in the Rockaway, Queens district. Meanwhile, Carl Svensson has been active in establishing a Republican Liberty Caucus group in NY. There are similar groups in other states, but we are setting up New York's now. In the attached blog from this past March, Frederic Dicker describes some of the dynamics in the Republican Party in New York. The situation is worse than what Dicker describes, because the D'amato/Pataki wing of the New York Republican party does not, in my opinion, do much for small business (as Dicker's article suggests) but rather was transformed a number of years ago into a meal ticket for the health and hospital workers' union and other public employees. The Sun recently proclaimed the increases in Pataki's 2006 budget to be the largest since the days of Nelson Rockefeller, earning Pataki "Nelson" as his moniker.

There are historical reasons for the decline of New York state. In particular, the increased emphasis on centralization in the 1920s and 1930s, which was the historical foundation for the national "New Deal". Al Smith, the last of the Tammany Hall governors in the 1920s, had argued for reform in the 19-teens when he was an assemblyman. As governor in the 1920s, he got to oversee the programs. FDR was the next New York governor, and when he subsequently was elected president adopted similar reforms at the federal level, even appointing some of New York's reform figures such as Frances Perkins. Fifty years after Smith's reforms, New York City declared bankruptcy. The City's economic decline was also the product of urban "renewal" overseen by liberal Republican Robert Moses, whose tenure spanned the entire period from Smith's governorship to roughly the point where the city declared bankruptcy. Moses too was associated with centralization and its deformities, to include mistaken decisions that the liberal borg advocated at the time, but now claims it opposed. Much of what Moses did was well-intentioned, which illustrates the fallacy of liberalism--its ideas rarely work and often hurt the people it claims to help. Although the expansion of public sector labor unions was not directly related to Smith, Roosevelt or Moses, it was very much in the tradition of their expansionist state.

As a result of the state's history, the polity of New York is deadened and, frankly, stupid. Debates tend to be framed in terms of the left-wing model that government expansion favors the common man and counter-balances freedom, which favors the rich. Seventy-five years of exodus from the state and city aren't enough to disprove this failed model for New York's media and voters. Their envious and destructive emotions result in legislation that ever drives more working people and businesses out of the state, such as tax schemes aimed to penalize low-price merchants. The belief that more government can cure social ills is rampant among the poor and working class, educated in New York's incompetently run public schools that serve as ideological brainwashing institutions for the liberal viewpoint. It is also common among Wall Street types who benefit in the form of lucrative municipal bond deals.

The outcome is that poor and working class neighborhoods and factories have been decimated. Since the 1920s, the state has been in a consistent pattern of decline, which Nelson Pataki has accelerated through his cynical, tax and spend policies.

Stu Mirsky's candidacy and Carl Svensson's organizing activities are important steps in the right direction. My hope is that as the state's decline accelerates, they can bring some insight to the benighted media capital of the world.