New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Mr. “Fair & Just”

This sadly out-of-touch fellow is operating on a Marxist-based template 100% certain to make NYC a less competitive city for business and a less safe city for all residents. As this Wall Street Journal article illustrates, a big percentage of New Yorkers have awoken, if a little late, to the anti-business, anti-safety progressive clown they have installed in office. New Yorkers will benefit from reading Thomas Sowell’s excellent essay highlighting Switzerland and Singapore. Were mayor de Blasio to read and follow up on the course these two safe and highly competitive countries have taken, all New Yorkers would receive a mighty boost.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. de Blasio’s election campaign to raise taxes on the rich, shutter charter schools and end stop-and-frisk policing tapped into voters’ fatigue with the Bloomberg administration. But the Quinnipiac poll suggests that voters on whole are happy with the results of Mr. Bloomberg’s policies—a stronger economy, better schools and safer streets—even if they’re weary of the man himself and his sometimes heavy-handed methods. It would be a mistake for Mr. de Blasio to interpret his election as a mandate to dismantle his predecessor’s policies, but he seems dead set on doing it anyway.

The self-styled progressive has demanded that Albany raise taxes on the city’s top earners to pay for universal pre-K because it is “fair” and “just.” Last week, he and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito rammed through legislation expanding paid sick leave notwithstanding complaints from small businesses. Mr. Bloomberg’s political touch may soon start to look light relative to the city’s new regime.

From Thomas Sowell:

Minimum-wage advocates can seize upon statistics collected in particular odd circumstances to declare that they have now “refuted” the “myth” that minimum wages cause unemployment.

Yet, despite such anomalies, it is surely no coincidence that those few places in the industrial world which have had no minimum-wage law, such as Switzerland and Singapore, have consistently had unemployment rates down around 3 percent. “The Economist” magazine once reported: “Switzerland’s unemployment neared a five-year high of 3.9% in February.”

It is surely no coincidence that during the last administration in which there was no federal minimum wage — the Calvin Coolidge administration — unemployment ranged from a high of 4.2 percent to a low of 1.8 percent over its last four years.

It is surely no coincidence that, when the federal minimum-wage law remained unchanged for twelve years while inflation rendered the law meaningless, the black teenage unemployment rate — even during the recession year of 1949 — was literally a fraction of what it has been throughout later years when the minimum-wage rate was raised repeatedly to keep up with inflation.