NYC Liberals Kill Off 200 Jobs Because... - Granite Grok

NYC Liberals Kill Off 200 Jobs Because…

Central Park Pedicab drivers

About 200 New York City pedicab drivers are being forced out of work in the name of progress. Students, minorities, women, and immigrant, among others, will be prohibited from plying their trade in and around Central Park so that mayor de Blasio can keep the deep-pocketed Teamsters and Animal rights activists happy.

To save the jobs of Central Park’s carriage-horse drivers, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and city council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito have developed a plan that involves destroying the livelihood of the city’s pedicab drivers. De Blasio’s elaborate proposal to build—at the city’s expense—a state-of-the-art equine facility in Central Park capable of stabling 70 horses and housing their carriages is meant to mollify animal-rights activists, to whom he’d promised to eliminate the horse-carriage industry entirely. The bar on pedicabs accepting fares within the park south of 86th Street emerged as a last-minute coda to the perverse horse-carriage compromise, and was probably thrown in as a sweetener—or sop—to the Teamsters union, which represents the horse-carriage workers

[NY City Council Speaker Melissa] Mark-Viverito’s hypocrisy highlights a paradox inherent to the progressive doctrine that she shares with de Blasio. Both claim the moral high ground when ideas are at issue; both are sanguine when it comes to the effects of these ideas on real people. In the name of the noble ideal of affordable housing, for instance, the city uses eminent domain in downtown Brooklyn to evict thousands of middle-class residents. In the name of the noble ideal of school equity, the city fights to shutter charter schools whose mission is to educate impoverished minority youth. And in the name of the noble ideal of kindness to animals—and to salvage a silly campaign promise—the city will put 200 pedicab drivers out of work.

Read the whole thing at city-journal.org

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