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By Root 1110 0

he does not confuse what he would like with what his city can afford. “I firmly believe,” he told the symposium, “that the purpose of city government is to provide basic services to people. That has to start with those services that are absolutely necessary in the city and progress to another order of priority, and once you define what those basic, absolutely needed services are in the city and you go to some point where you’re going to say, ‘At this point we stop,’ then you have to decide where you get that money to provide those basic services. There’s not much beyond that.… Now, New York’s budget is near the top when you look at any government structure in this country, about third to the federal government. You’re not talking about a big city any more at that level; you’re talking about a budget that is larger than most countries in the world. You have to look very carefully at what services the city should be providing, because it is still part of the state and still part of this country.”

Reflecting the view prevalent in New York, Peter Salins, Chairman of the Urban Affairs Department of City University’s Hunter College, challenged Gibson. The purpose of a city, he said, is not just “the maximization of the economic output of the city”; the city is “an upward mobility machine.” A city has “to make sure that all of those activities that contribute to upward mobility are kept intact. Now what that means is that, in some ways, conventional housekeeping is the least important. I’m not saying that I like a city littered with garbage or a city with inadequate fire protection, but in terms of the very essence of the city’s responsibilities and the ultimate well-being of its residents, some of the social services which are considered so expendable are the least expendable.” Presumably, balanced budgets get in the way of this egalitarian goal. The city becomes a substitute for the national government. Business comes to be viewed as provider of taxes rather than jobs; middle-income people have an obligation to stay—despite reduced services—so that the poor may move upward. Whether it works matters less than whether you try to make it work.

This philosophy, embedded deep in New York’s political culture, helped break the city’s economy. But this breakdown of a political culture has occurred elsewhere. On the “right” side of the social and political scale, states such as Mississippi and Texas choose to ignore their poor, preferring surpluses, huge profits and low taxes to people services. Many Southern states ignore the unfair labor practices of companies such as J. P. Stevens. New York firemen, unlike those in Dayton, Ohio, never went on strike and watched, callously, as buildings burned to the ground. Despite the Civil War, segregation was legally sanctioned by many states into the 1960’s. Despite balanced budgets and labor peace, the poor and other citizens of Chicago paid a steep price for Mayor Richard Daley’s autocratic rule. Whether in the city of Detroit, where collection boxes are pilfered, or in the medieval village of Auletta, in southern Italy, where the crucifix and saints in its tiny hilltop church have been stolen, our churches are no longer shrines.

In this sense, New York is not unique but is a metaphor for the nation and the world. Or, as former Treasury Secretary William Simon argues in his book A Time for Truth, “New York is not disconnected from America. It is America’s premier city and its intellectual headquarters. It is America in microcosm—America in its most culturally concentrated form. The philosophy, the illusions, the pretensions, and the rationalizations which guide New York City are those which guide the entire country. What is happening to New York, therefore, is overwhelmingly important to all Americans, and it is imperative that they understand it … [or] New York’s present must inevitably become America’s future.” Steep taxes, huge deficits, burdensome debts, high energy and pension costs, placating interest groups with public money, industries that can no longer compete, the declining work