Local Politics

Ron Paul's campaign for liberty advocates that libertarian-minded individuals get involved in local politics. I was curious whether I could get involved in any meaningful fashion at the local level. So I started googling what my local community board is doing and I just noticed this:

"[CB12] also supported the Department of Housing’s request to rehabilitate a threestory building at 567 W. 183rd St. into nine transitional housing units for newly released, male and female homeless exconvicts who are diagnosed with AIDS."

from (http://manhattantimesnews.com/covers/Archives/2008/Vol9N48.pdf).

Now I am left wondering what kind of crimes these people committed. (I'm also so not staying in this neighborhood when the lease is up.) I'm comforted by the fact that I am not a small woman. I'm no putting any faith (anytime soon) in the idea that any government program rehabilitated anyone.

The leftist lunacy doesn't stop with the government programs for convicts. On page 3 of the pdf I linked, there are photos of MTA employees with signs asking for no cutbacks on transit and asking for tax increases on the rich. Here's a choice quote:

“We should be informing our union members and mobilizing them to get out on the streets and make sure that transit knows in no uncertain terms that we’re not going to tolerate layoffs,” he said.

Of course the above enraged me. Unions saying they won't tolerate lay-offs and ex-convicts living down the street from me is not so wonderful. I couldn't imagine picketing my day job and saying things like, "I'm not gonna tolerate lay-offs." I guess it works for government employees and unions, though.

Unions and convicts -- so what, you say? Well, it gets worse: CB12 has its sights on funding more projects with government money. They apparently have a list of 50+ government spending items, but have prioritized seniors this year. The local government is interested in using tax payer dollars to take care of seniors:

“I see that our senior issues are going up,” he said. In the rankings, tallied and
released after the board’s Nov. 18 general meeting, it seems the community board agreed with him. The 47-member body ranked “increase funding for quality home care services for the elderly” as the number one expense item and “funds to expand and improve the physical structure of senior centers” as the number one capital expenditure. The second most important issue involved the police. Increasing the number of police officers at the 33rd and 34th Police Precincts, was the number two expense item, while providing them with cars and bicycles and vans was the
number two capital expenditure requested by the board."

I'm left wondering what will happen to the seniors once the government funding dries up completely over the next 3-5 years. Does making these people dependent on local government even make sense?

Every few weeks I see flyers from my district rep and CB12 about increased this or that, but they still have not prevented the local graffiti taggers from mucking up the paintings and murals they spent money on this summer in the subway tunnels. My neighborhood looks as ghetto and worthless as it did before that expenditure.

The Manhattan Times is a rag about the sob stories of poor people who want to tax the rich and pass new government programs every year. There's no way anyone with any reasonable, taxable income would possibly want to subject themselves to this big government stupidity. Living in North Manhattan is a form of financial suicide. (A good example of this is how Bloomberg arbitrarily changed his policy on property tax rebates this year.)

So, back to Ron Paul's point about local involvement:

Perhaps, as a young person in 'transition', I may not want to commit to my particular local government. It seems as if the best option is to find a place with a government I like, and then actively protect the system in place. I honestly doubt I could convince CB12 to stop spending on police, seniors, and ex-convicts. The big-government mentality seems too deeply ingrained in the festering pile of crap that North Manhattan is.

North Manhattan could probably use a giant fire, like the one that took out Chicago in 1871, to fix its problems.

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