Drowning the Bronx

Sandwiched between ads for BMW, Chevron, and Morgan Stanley in the October issue of Harper's Magazine is a cover story by Naomi Klein on what she calls "disaster capitalism." She cites these columns as an example, writing, "After heavy rain caused the shutdown of New York City's subway lines, the New York Sun ran an editorial under the headline, ‘Sell the Subways.' It called for individual train lines to compete against each other, luring customers with the safest, driest service — and ‘charging higher fares when the competing lines, stingier on their investments, were shut down with tracks under water.'"

Writes Ms. Klein: "It's not hard to imagine what this free market in subways would look like: high-speed lines ferrying commuters from the Upper West Side to Wall Street, while the trains serving the South Bronx wouldn't just continue their long decay — they would simply drown." She expanded on the topic Monday evening to a sold-out auditorium at the New York Public Library. Promotional language on the NYPL Web site claims that Ms. Klein "explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically, and that unfettered capitalism goes hand in hand with democracy."

Well, if Ms. Klein's observations about the Sun and the subways are any indication, her savvy about the "global free market" is lacking. If capitalism served only the rich and not the poor, the American retail sector would be all Tiffanys and no Wal-Mart. If the transportation sector worked that way, the airports would be all private jets, and Southwest Airlines wouldn't be the success that it is. Greyhound Bus Lines and the Fung Wah buses wouldn't exist; only private limousines would.

Contrary to Ms. Klein's prediction, the fact is that any good businessman running a subway would see a market to be served in the millions of customers in the Bronx and other non-wealthy boroughs. As for Wall Street commuters, many of them live on the East Side or in the suburbs, and the subway may be less essential for them, because in a pinch they can get to work in black cars or taxis. And it's not necessary to hypothesize about this. There's a history.

Back when the subway system in New York was run by private enterprise instead of a government monopoly bureaucracy, the Bronx was awash with privately owned and operated trolley cars run by the Third Avenue Railway Company. When August Belmont opened his Interborough Rapid Transit Company, it served the Bronx, too, one of the reasons it deserved the name "Interborough." Even in today's government-run system, investment by the owners of the Yankees in a new stadium is spurring transit station improvements, disproving Ms. Klein's notion that private enterprise is somehow antithetical to subway service in the Bronx.

It's hard to imagine that Bronx riders — or those elsewhere in the city — can be worse served than by a government-run system that squishes to a halt in a light drizzle. Ms. Klein footnotes her article with a line about how "Washington's think tanks have been on such an aggressive campaign to privatize the essential functions of the state." She might have taken a look at a New York think tank, the Manhattan Institute, which hasn't been particularly out front on the matter of privatizing the subway (though it has done some interesting work on bus lines).

The Institute recently published its third annual Hayek lecture, delivered in June by an associate professor of political science at Brown, John Tomasi. Professor Tomasi concluded, "Like Hayek, one can be against expansive government programs precisely because one is for social justice." One gets the impression that this is what the left really fears. It has had decades in which to prove that a socialistic solution to mass transit works, but has only delivered to New Yorkers a filthy subway that can't operate in the rain and still costs them an arm and a leg in fares and taxes.