New York City is struggling with the financial toll of the illegal immigrant crisis, so as part of the city-wide budget reductions, the Director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, Jacques Jiha, suggested reduced overtime hours for the NYPD, the Department of Sanitation, the Fire Department, and the Department of Corrections.
This is an old play known as the Washington Monument Defense:
When informed that cuts in jobs and in pay were inevitable, the municipal unions ran amok. It is only fair to say that Mayor Beame’s cuts in the summer of 1975, under the supervision of the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), were deliberately inflammatory. They were calculated for the purpose of “proving” that the city needed state and federal aid. Beame dismissed nearly 5000 policemen and more than 2000 firemen (closing twenty-six firehouses) and fired nearly 3000 of the city’s 10,000 sanitation workers. The unions understood that this was an act of political blackmail. In June 1975 the firemen’s and policemen’s unions published a four page leaflet which they distributed to tourists. Titled “Welcome to Fear City,” with a lurid skeleton’s head on the cover, the pamphlet advised visitors to New York to stay indoors after 6 P.M., avoid public transportation, and, “until things change, stay away from New York if you possibly can.” In July the sanitation workers went on strike. They threatened to turn “Fear City” into “Stink City” and shouted from picket lines, “Wait till the rats come!”
[From William E. Simon’s A Time For Truth]
Statists don’t have a lot of categorically different arrows in their quiver. They all come down to a threat of some sort, whether it’s a threat to harm us directly, with their enforcers, or a threat to harm us indirectly, by withholding something we need that they control. It works more often than not.
And it suggests that the whole rotten notion that some must rule over others, whether we call it the State or government, must be ditched – the sooner the better – and replaced by free men who look after themselves and demand nothing of others except to be left in peace.
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Those that “rule from on high” believe that “we the people” can’t make informed decisions. Of course it helps their cause if they hide the truth or create conditions that “only they” can correct. When they look down upon those they consider inferior all that they see is chaos. In the opinion of those that see that chaos there must be a better way. They, of course, have had a vision of that better way.
That chaos is what caused man to create pots and pans and bows and arrows and airplanes and automobiles and steam locomotives. That chaos inspired man to build sailing vessels and fishing poles and spaghetti and meatballs and chicken marsala. Man invented ways to improve the harvest of rice and corn and peas and carrots and cows and chickens. He built cathedrals and houses and skyscrapers aqueducts. Man harnessed the wind and water and electricity and fire. All of these and more came due to the chaos that surrounds us.
“We the People” didn’t ask for or need the assistance or intervention of government.
Evil Franklin