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Bloomberg in Hong Kong
There's a funny little profile of New York City's mayor in the February Esquire, though it's not online. So, in it, Mike Bloomberg goes to Hong Kong, and he takes along Jon Liu, the comptroller, and Esquire is all like, why did he invite you, and Jon Liu's all, "I'm sure he has his reasons." Heh. So over there what they do is, the transit system owns rights to land around the train station, so they build malls around the stations, in conjunction with private developers, and this pays for a good chunk of the excellent transit system. And of course Bloomberg loves this. "In America, the ultimate capitalist system, government is getting in the way of everything," Bloomberg says over there. Funny stuff!
Our shopping centers tend to be served by freeways, which government did a fine job of promoting and building, and which certain capitalists (hint hint) were happy enough with. What is Bloomberg's problem?
He really computes out to a near-perfect Randite. He's probably a big fan of Julian Simon, too.
If Bloomberg really wants to see this happen, he should use his supervillain money to relocate all the major cities of the US into new england, so we have the same distribution as China. Maybe he can use enormous city-sized helicopters?
Bloomberg best not tell tell Donald Trump he's shopping New York property development to those red Chi-Com bastards. He'll blow (another) nut.
"private developers" = Chinese Mafia.
Much like over here, actually.
John C Liu is a good guy with a really annoying twitter presence. That is all. In case you missed my interview with Ann Tripp, listen in at 9:35 am on WLIB AM 1190. 9:00 AM Dec 16th, 2010 via HootSuite
What a downer.
Errr…wha? Pretty much all the land in NYC has been privately owned since at least the 18th century, so the government would have to "get in the way" by doing a taking under eminent domain law, thereby nullifying the property rights of many, and then turn around and lease it to developers. Why do people continue to believe he is smart and competent when he says things like this?
I was thinking the same thing. How does putting private property in the hands of government transit agencies get government out of the way? I guess that's the funny part Choire speaks of?