A Fairytale of Two Cities
by Myron Magnet
As its very name suggests, mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio’s tale of two cities is pure fiction, a myth that formed the intellectual basis of leftist politics long before Marx turned it into “science.” Its key idea is that the rich are rich because they have somehow extracted their wealth from the poor, causing their poverty.
Thomas Paine said it in 1797: “The accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labour that produced it.”
Thomas Carlyle said it in in 1843, almost a generation before Das Kapital: “‘My starving workers?’ answers the rich mill-owner: ‘Did not I hire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the sum covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?’”
In the early days of industrialization, when nearly naked children pulled carts of coal through mine shafts and factory workers got ground up by unfenced machinery, this tale had a core of truth. But what should we say about New York’s early-twentieth-century sweatshop workers in the mass-produced-clothing industry that other Jewish immigrants had just invented? Would they really rather have been back in the shtetls from which they came, and did they really think that giving their children the opportunity that America offered didn’t make it worthwhile? As for New York’s poor of today, there is not a scintilla of truth in the notion that the co-op dwellers of Fifth and Park Avenues have caused their poverty—not even if you believe that Wall Street hanky-panky is the cause of the deep unemployment America suffers five years after the outset of the financial crisis.
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Readmore: www.city-journal.org
In the early days of industrialization, when nearly naked children pulled carts of coal through mine shafts and factory workers got ground up by unfenced machinery, this tale had a core of truth. But what should we say about New York’s early-twentieth-century sweatshop workers in the mass-produced-clothing industry that other Jewish immigrants had just invented? Would they really rather have been back in the shtetls from which they came, and did they really think that giving their children the opportunity that America offered didn’t make it worthwhile? As for New York’s poor of today, there is not a scintilla of truth in the notion that the co-op dwellers of Fifth and Park Avenues have caused their poverty—not even if you believe that Wall Street hanky-panky is the cause of the deep unemployment America suffers five years after the outset of the financial crisis.
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Readmore: www.city-journal.org
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