The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [158]
The book, The Morality of Consent, is the work of the late Alexander M. Bickel, a Yale University scholar. Bickel wrote of a series of decisions and events in the sixties and early seventies: If the public and the Congress had to be deceived to gain support and “defeat” communism, so be it. When reform legislation crawled too slowly through state legislatures or the Congress, the Supreme Court skipped legal precedents and passed its own laws. To protest the war, it was necessary to deny Defense Secretary McNamara freedom of speech at Harvard. After Karl Armstrong bombed the University of Wisconsin, historian Gabriel Kolko apologized: “To condemn Karl Armstrong,” Bickel quotes Kolko, “is to condemn a whole anguished generation. His intentions were more significant than the unanticipated consequences [one dead, four injured] of his actions.” If we had to discriminate with racial quotas to end discrimination, conduct illegal wiretaps or invent “the plumbers” in the name of “law and order”—so be it.
Bickel found a common denominator in these decisions: an abuse of either power or “the process,” as he called it. “The [social] fabric,” he said, “is held together by agreement on means.… The derogators of procedure and technicalities, and other antiinstitutional forces who rode high, on the bench as well as off, were the armies of conscience and ideology.…” The ancient question of means and ends.
What does this have to do with New York? The same common thread stretched through many—not all—of the often well-intentioned decisions which helped hobble the city. It was Nelson Rockefeller’s liberal impulse—not to mention megalomania and desire to get reelected—that drove him to devise “moral obligation” bonds in order to build more housing and avoid the danger of voter disapproval. It was the liberal impulse to centralize executive power that prompted the drafters of the 1961 City Charter to remove the comptroller and Board of Estimate as a check on the mayor’s power to estimate revenues. It was the liberal impulse to reward labor as a valued friend, to tax and borrow and fraud rather than balance city budgets. No one compelled New York State to spend 60 percent more than the national average for elementary and secondary education; to offer scholarship and tuition assistance that is three times that of the next highest state; to offer the most generous Medicaid program in the U.S.—the state has 8.5 percent of the nation’s population yet accounts for 23 percent of all Medicaid spending.
Obviously, these decisions can be attributed to such nonideological truisms as “politics,” weak leadership, a docile electorate or human nature. As noted, New York was the victim of forces and decisions beyond its control. But we learn something about what happened to New York when we also view past local decisions as violations of fiscal and legal restraints—of “the process.” New York forgot about Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that guides a free market and turned it away from city bonds to more secure investments; forgot that expedient means (excessive borrowing and taxation) would inevitably lead to a bad end (deep debt and loss of jobs); that each city is not an island; that the social contract is violated when leaders lie, be it about budgets or Vietnam body counts.
Another failure was at work in New York—an excessive faith in people. Liberals succumbed to the blissful notion, promulgated more than 100 years ago by Marx and Engels, that the concept of “human nature” was silly. The left believed that institutions, society, capitalism, determined how people would behave. “Does it require deep intuition,” they wrote in The Communist Manifesto, “to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in