It’s an iron law of the political class that no government agency, regardless of its poor record, can ever be abolished.

Case in point: The Empire State Development Corporation. They are in the news today as the great fixer of the power elite, Bob Wilmers, has been brought in to whip the failed agency into shape.

This agency was created in 1968 and was known as the Urban Development Corporation. I guess they changed their DBA because of the bad press UDC got from all its failed projects.

The UDC was based on a lie—that the free market had failed in New York and needed help from the state.

There was no free market in New York in the liberal heyday of the 1960s when Rockefeller was spending wildly. Naturally, since it was based on a false premise, UDC has failed to revive the New York economy in 40 years, even though they spent gargantuan sums of money.

All over the world, countries are discovering that central planning does not work but New York politicians have yet to discover that fact. That’s why they build a new city in China every month or so but the UDC can’t build a sporting goods store in Buffalo in 10 years!

On top of everything else, the UDC is an authority—a failed form of government that Free New York (freenewyork.org) has exposed many times.

There is no good reason to have a UDC or ESDC. Abolish them now! Return the money to the taxpayers and return the planning duties to tens of thousands of individual entrepreneurs who are wagering their own money in their own neighborhoods and in their own industries.

And why can’t a government agency ever be abolished? That’s easy. Because it would serve to discredit not only that agency but the whole modern, progressive, liberal, Rockefeller Republican notion that politicians and bureaucrats can improve on the performance of the free marketplace which is based instead of the combined talents, knowledge, energy and peaceful collaboration of all six billion people on the planet.

Yeah, good luck with that, Mr. Wilmers.

James Ostrowski
Free New York
Buffalo