Snow White and Mayor Dork

On Sunday December 26, 2010, the blizzard of 2010 hit the northeastern United States. I, for one, enjoyed watching the snow fall. If we can’t have a white Christmas, a white day-after-Christmas is the next best thing.

But in New York City things were not so merry. Upwards of two feet of snow fell in New York. Clearing the roads after a snowstorm seems a relatively simple challenge, one for which Mayor Michael Bloomberg should have had ample time to prepare. The mayor’s absolute failure reveals him as an absolute incompetent.

For years Bloomberg has opposed libertarian freedoms in New York City, from gun rights to the right to smoke cigarettes in bars. (This was a pet peeve of mine, back when I used to smoke and drink.) But at the very least, he has tended to handle emergencies well — at least, one always saw him on the evening news at the scene of the disaster, once the mess had been cleared up. But not this time.

I spoke with my father two days after the blizzard. He lives in eastern Queens, and he was still snowed in, with the roads outside his house unplowed, the piles of snow too high to get past, and bus and subway lines in his area not running. His fate was shared by most people in Queens and Brooklyn.

I am spending my winter vacation at my mother’s home in southwestern Connecticut, and here I get New York TV news channels, which showed that the city was in a state of devastation. It was reported that the day after the snowstorm it took eight hours for ambulances to respond to 911 calls because of the condition of the roads. The next day, the news said that the mayor blamed his inability to plow the roads on drivers who had irresponsibly abandoned their cars in the middle of the street. TV reporters are consistent in saying that New Yorkers are outraged. The City Council plans to respond to this emergency by… holding a hearing.

What New York City needs is men of action, not windbag politicians. If the city is too incompetent to clear the roads after a snowstorm, it is only because politicians and bureaucrats have no accountability and suffer no monetary loss from the failure of state-owned infrastructure. Needless to say, two feet of snow is not the worst crisis that the city may face in the future. The only way to prevent a future disaster is to stick our hand into our magical bag of libertarian wisdom and pull out an idea whose time has come: privatize the roads.

If the streets of New York City were under private ownership, the owners would make certain that snow removal happened efficiently; if they failed then they would go bankrupt and someone else would buy the roads and operate them to the satisfaction of consumers. One TV news story showed a Brooklyn family with a newborn baby. With an oil truck trapped in piles of snow just a few streets away, their heat had gone out for lack of oil, and ambulances had trouble reaching them. Their baby’s death should weigh on the conscience of every statist who fights against allowing free market competition to improve upon the nightmare of state-owned infrastructure.