Just Make More Money

Fellow blogger Mitchell Langbert wrote an excellent and enlightening analysis of the economic climate and Mayor Bloomberg’s Plan for New York City invoking the notorious “Let them eat cake” mantra of the haughty pre-revolutionary saga of French history. It is a sad but true commentary on the economic and social decline of the once greatest city in the world. The true pioneers of prosperity and progress, the local businessmen and entrepreneurs continue to make a hasty exodus while the void is filled at the bottom with public sector union jobs and at the top of the bloated bureaucracy, with highly compensated staffers of a dysfunctional one-party government. Bloomberg’s new plan is a Christmas bonus for the privileged few lawyers, advertising executives and foreign diplomats who occupy skyscraper penthouses and the corner offices overlooking Central Park. I had my own rude awakening years ago with a trademark attorney occupying the penthouse suites of the Chrysler building to whom I naively hand delivered my papers and was charged $800 for our 40 minute meeting plus $50 clerical charges just to make a copy.

This aloof economic climate that caters to the wealthiest cosmopolitan elites brings to mind another sad phase of post-revolutionary France. This period was the reactionary era of the Bourbon king Louis Phillippe when the people were demanding a greater access to voting which was only granted to the narrowest segment of the wealthy classes of the population. In response to their demands his arrogant chief minister Francois Guizzot flippantly replied: "What's the matter with the suffrage? There's no problem here. Just make more money." Our own out-of-touch Mayor acting like a divine right monarch of New York who has even dispatched health police to ban smoking and transfats because his Excellency knows what is best for the peasants, tells them “there’s no problem with New York. Just make more money.”

I am reminded as well of the recent fiery speech that Rabbi Spero delivered comparing the New York Times reading bluebloods of New York’s Upper West Side to Parisians. The New York Sun reported a rally in Manhattan where he called for the boycott and federal prosecution of the New York Times for the treasonous act of publishing national security secrets used to monitor the financial trail of terrorists. Rabbi Spero then spoke about the character of the readers who would be attracted to this unpatriotic worldview as reported in the news story by the Sun:

He added that the patriotic image of the Times had disappeared, saying that it was now only read by the "snobs on the Upper West Side" and "trans-nationalists and cosmopolitans," who called themselves "citizens of the world, not Americans. They think that they have had graduated from America and see themselves more as Parisians or something like that," he said.