The long, sordid history of New York’s Penn Station shows how progressives have made it too hard for the government to do big things—and why, believe it or not, Robert Caro is to blame.
Name the progressive who promises to hike living costs a lot?
Milton Friedman argued in his Newsweek columns circa 1970, and other places that government was promoting higher living costs which was bad because workers used unions to demand higher pay and benefits, which caused other workers to also get higher wages.
The higher wages caused increased consumer spending, mostly on new stuff, like new cars, more cars, which required bigger places to live, and tax and spend conservatives hiked living costs with higher taxes to pay workers to build roads, and spend and tax liberals paid workers to build schools and water and sewer and playgrounds to make nicer communities.
And the government regulators of utilities listened to workers (unions), widows who bought utility bonds to live on, customers who wanted reliable power, managers who wanted bigger kingdoms, and hiked rates to pay more workers to produce more utility service that was more reliable, but limited returns to investors by cutting the price of assets by depreciation, which forced managers to justify new equipment to replace the old to provide more and better service, and oh, by the way, pay investors more.
Friedman argued that paying all those workers to provide more and better service to everyone cost too much and charmed customers.
Of course, Friedman never pointed out that workers were the customers, so everyone thought that Friedman was saving them money without doing anything to stop their constantly increasing wages.
In 1970, rural telephone customers were served by party lines, and by about 1976 when Carter was elected, most now had party lines, so Cartrr, Ted Kennedy, and conservatives agreed to deregulate the utilities. Progressives loved how this would kill the reasons to build nuclear power plants, and everyone else loved not paying higher utility rates.
What no one expected was all the job losses, the wage and benefit cuts.
Nor did anyone understand Friedman's argument than anyone who wanted more than what was offered in 1970 should pay whatever it cost to provide the extra service at whatever high profit the capitalists wanted to charge.
Thus, high speed intrrnet over fiber is limited to only the wealthy because that is luxury today just as it would have been in 1970.
Likewise, getting back to transit. Paying workers to build really good transit costs too much. Only those who need it should pay, not the people who can afford cars and buy houses where the tax and spenders built roads, water and sewer, schools, etc.
Note, airports have been paid for and built for the rich, the members of Congress in control of tax and spend and borrow, but other than Joe Biden, almost no one rides the train. And Joe seldom goes as far as NYC.
Paying workers is costly. If you don't want neighborhoods bulldozed, you need to pay lots more to workers, eg, paying the sandhogs to tunnel underground, workers who are easy to organize into unions.
Conservatives have convinced progressives that paying workers cost too much so all the progressives talk about is cutting costs.
Bernie promises to cut costs. Warren promises to cut costs.
Milton Friedman would be very happy that progressives agree with him that cutting costs is the number one priority.
But cutting costs ALWAYS MEANS CUTTING LABOR COSTS, KILLING JOBS, CUTTING WAGES, ELIMINSTING BENEFITS.
Unless you as a worker want yo buy government bonds that will never pay interest or ever be repaid, government borrowing money to pay workers trillions of dollars to build public capital requires much higher taxes and fees paid by workers.
To say, as Bernie and Warren do that the rich, who are rich because the workers who can save buy stocks have inflated the scarce supply of stock prices, can pay for everything is a declaration of taxing workers with higher incomes. Ie, Bill Gates and Bezos and other rich people will be forced to sell stocks to pay taxes, and they can't sell yo the rich because they must pay taxes, so that means workers must buy the stocks for their 401Ks, IRAs, etc. If they don't, stock prices crash and trillions in wealth will vanish and the rich $100 billionaires Gates and Bezos will be only $50 billionaires with each losing $50 billion or so into the ether.
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