It’s easy to see why New York’s Mayor Mike Bloomberg is now focused on closing down liquor retail outlets and correcting New Yorkers’ behavior. How can he not push ahead with his continued social-engineering schemes, seeing as the city is running so smoothly otherwise: “Every escalator at the 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue subway station, one of the busiest in the city, was offline Thursday morning,” Fox’s local news reports. “Seven of seven escalators are out at the height of the morning commute 8:15 to 9:15, when tens of thousands of commuters are rushing to work.”
The words of Mark Steyn (actually writing about escalators) come to mind:
In “developing nations,” they’re a symbol of progress. In decaying nations, they’re an emblem of decline. In pre-Thatcher Britain, the escalators seized up, and stayed unrepaired for months on end. Eventually, someone would start them up again, only for them to break down 48 hours later and be out of service for another 18 months. It was always the up escalators. You were in a country that could only go downhill: All chutes, no ladders.
Perhaps we’re luckier than Britain. Both our up and down escalators are stuck. Which means there’s no place to go but…somewhere.
Mayor Bloomberg would have felt right at home in the NSDAP (circa 1936) except for the minor annoynace of his last name. See Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism.