De Blasio’s Domino’s outrage sums up why businesses are fleeing NYC
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Bill de BlasioTaidgh Barron
Mayor de Blasio’s batty attention has for the moment lighted upon Domino’s Pizza, which sold pies to New Year’s Eve revelers in Times Square for $30 each, roughly double its usual excellent price of about $15 for a large cheese carry out in Manhattan.
The outrage! Hilton execs had better hope His Honor doesn’t find out that their Times Square hotel charges about 13 times its usual rate for a room on Dec. 31. God help the poor florists if this dope ever hears about Valentine’s Day.
The thing that always befuddles leftish class-war politicians such as de Blasio is that supply and demand are real things and prices reflect the real preferences of real people. Domino’s would love to charge $500 for a pizza, but it can’t because buyers have something to say about that, specifically, “No.” That’s how free exchange works.
But for anti-business politicians such as de Blasio, the story isn’t about supply and demand — it’s about good guys and bad guys. Mostly bad guys, because the purported sins of Big Business are a welcome distraction from the failures of Big Government.
For example, when anti-Trump protests and a Secret Service cordon all but shut down business along Fifth Avenue in November 2016, crippling a number of luxury fashion retailers, de Blasio sniffed, “I will not tell you that Gucci and Tiffany are my central concerns in life.”
But the people who own those stores are his constituents. So are the people who work there. So are many of the people who shop there. All of them are taxpayers. And many of the businesses that were disrupted were locally owned firms from art galleries to restaurants. They deserve a government that keeps the streets open for business.
Increasingly, people are finding that kind of government elsewhere: in Texas, in Florida, in the Carolinas, in Nevada. Big Democratic states such as New York and California are losing families, workers and businesses to better-governed states at a remarkable clip. There are whole subdivisions in booming cities such as Henderson, Nev., that are full of California refugees, and Raleigh, North Carolina, is filling up with New Yorkers.
They aren’t looking for a better deal on New Year’s Eve pizza.
De Blasio loves to complain about business, but business has better reason to complain about him — and about like-minded Democrats in other progressive states. The politicians want to micromanage the price of pizza, but the things that are entrusted to them — including the schools and the subways — are not nearly as well-run as your average Domino’s. But to Democrats — not just this feckless mayor but also national figures such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — the businesses that create the jobs, provide the goods and pay the taxes are only livestock to be milked, shorn and occasionally slaughtered.
In New York, the problem is getting home at night. In much of California, the problem is having a home to go to, with artificial restrictions on building new housing causing runaway inflation in housing prices. In a sense, Bay Area real estate is expensive for the same reason as Times Square pizza on New Year’s Eve: Entry into the marketplace is artificially restricted. There are ways around that, from regulatory reform to more sensible tax policies. Instead, progressives such as San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who calls herself “pro-housing,” impose policies that make it harder to be a developer or a landlord, for instance politically motivated restrictions on the allocation of affordable-housing units. That’s one reason why San Francisco has seen only one new unit of affordable housing built for every nine new low-wage and moderate-wage jobs created since 2016.
Partly that is genuine ignorance — they hate capitalism so much that they never bothered to learn how it works and why. Part of it is the need for political scapegoats — for every disappointment in this vale of tears, there is a cackling Scrooge McDuck swan-diving into a pile of gold doubloons, and he is to blame.
The mayor may complain about Domino’s surge-pricing its pizza on New Year’s Eve, but what is his government doing with that 3 percent it takes off the top of New Yorkers’ paychecks? Do you see clean streets and timely subway service? Or do you see a lot of big talk on Twitter and a city that is, at best, treading water?
The difference between Domino’s and Bill de Blasio? Domino’s delivers.
Kevin D. Williamson is the author of “The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics,” out now.
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