-By Thomas E. Brewton
We can count on government planners to produce the most inefficient projects conceivable by the human mind. Manhattan’s Freedom Tower, intended to rise on the site of 9/11 destruction, is an egregious example.
A recent Bloomberg News article reports, ” ‘The Freedom Tower isn’t economically feasible under present circumstances,’ said Douglas Durst, a third-generation New York developer whose company is building Bank of America’s new offices in midtown Manhattan.”
New York City, the nation’s most socialistically ingrained municipality, in the nation’s premier socialist state, has a long history of public works boon-doggles, of which the Freedom Tower is just the latest.
One of the earliest was the city’s efforts in the 1920s to compete with, and to destroy economically, the privately-owned IRT West Side subway lines. The chosen vehicle was Mayor Jimmy Walker’s IND subway system (famous, if nothing else, for Duke Ellington’s theme song, “Take the A Train”). In the end, both lines were economically unsustainable without city subsidies.
Continue reading “World Trade Towers: a Socialist Fiasco”