7.13.2007 | future orientation

From my native burg, the latest in the nanny impulse from Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Mr. Bloomberg appears to be a well-meaning and fairly competent mayor, as much as anyone can be in the suicide stew that is New York City.

But Mayor Mike has a fatal flaw: he's a white limousine liberal, sort of like the man who bears the burden of sending the city into its death spiral: John Vliet Lindsay, elected mayor in 1965, and who served as the poster boy for the term "limousine liberal."

Lindsay, may he rest in peace (d. December 19, 2000), was a gawdawful mayor. He pandered, he socialized, he caved in to every special interest group that could get some poor, suffering minority to front for them. Lindsay served as panderer-in-chief of the city for eight years, by which time the damage was done. And wasn't undone until Rudy became mayor in 1994. (don't blame me; I voted for Bill Buckley...)

Getting back to Mayor Mike, now he's unveiled what is to be the Next Big Thing in welfare: paying people to do what they should do as human beings and parents. The concept is to pay welfare queens for things like sending their kids to school, getting them library cards, getting the little bastards (hey, just stating a fact here) free health care, etc.

Heather Mac Donald lays all of this out in an article in the Weekly Standard. The basic problem facing the underclass? Something Ms. Mac Donald reminds us in not new:

After the urban riots of the 1960s, political scientist Edward Banfield observed that the central trait separating the poor from the prosperous is future orientation. His insight has never been improved upon. The middle and upper classes defer gratification and invest effort in self-improvement, Banfield wrote in The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of our Urban Crisis; were the underclass to do so, they would not long stay in the bottom economic tier.

It's not race; it's not ethnicity; it's not religion. What is at the root of multi-generational poverty is this lack of a "future orientation." Yes, prosperous Baby Boomers are notorious for indulging in instant gratification. But most of them are able to keep up that Pottery Barn - Whole Foods lifestyle despite this.

The urban poor stay down because of folks like John Lindsay and Mike Bloomberg who govern with the assumption that po' folks 'jist too dumb to do anything on their own, and need rewards for what the rest of us do.

Ms. Mac Donald summarizes by noting that this idiotarian scheme of Bloomberg's is, basically, a bribe to the bottom-dwellers:

Should the Bloomberg payment experiment go large-scale, as its architects hope, it will create a bizarre caste system, in which one part of society bribes the other to behave in ways that the paying class regards as basic to responsible human life. So far, the Bloomberg administration has not articulated any principle for distinguishing who is in that paying class, and who in the payee class, other than a crude income test. The program will enroll families at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty level. How will the administration explain to parents at 140 percent of the federal poverty line that their children should attend school simply because it is in their long-term self-interest, when their neighbors are getting paid for the same behavior?

If this is the sort of thing that Mayor Mike has in mind should he run for president, I'd say let's invoke the ABM Treaty: Anyone But Mike.