December 16, 2005
The New York City transit strike Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:50 PM EST The possibility of a New York City transit strike continues even though strikes by public employees are against the law everywhere. One President, Calvin Coolidge, got to the White House because as governor of Massachusetts he took a hard line on the Boston Police Strike of 1919, famously saying that “there is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” Another President, Ronald Reagan, made his reputation as a man who meant what he said (a very useful reputation for a President to have) when he fired the illegally striking air traffic controllers early in his first term. And yet strikes by public employees are not uncommon, even when the employees in question are not underpaid, which the transit workers certainly are not. The New York Times (not exactly an anti-union rag) ran an op-ed piece the other day showing that transit workers earn well above what other blue-collar workers in New York City earn and pay not one penny for their excellent health insurance. More, they can retire on half pay when they are only 55, if they have worked for the MTA for 25 years or more. So what does the Transit Workers Union want? Eight percent raises for each of the three years of the contract and retirement at 50. There is something fundamentally wrong here. And that, I think, is that the collective bargaining model, taken almost unchanged from the private sector, doesn’t work in the public sector. A corporation is a wealth-creating machine, in which people—both employees and investors—voluntarily come together in hopes of creating more wealth collectively than they could create individually. The bargaining between unions and management in the private sector, then, is really a negotiation about divvying up the wealth created. Both sides know that there are practical limits on how much of the pie they can have. Management knows that a sullen and resentful workforce is a much less productive one and that the best workers will leave for better opportunities in other wealth-creating machines if they are not paid a just sum. Further they know that the stockholders will fire them if they give away the candy store. Meanwhile labor knows that a company must be profitable or it won’t be in business long and all their members will be out of a job. None of that obtains in the public sector. An urban transit system doesn’t create wealth (although, hopefully, it facilitates the creation of wealth by others), and it can’t go out of business. Where corporate managers measure their success by how much profit their departments make, a function, in part, of keeping down labor costs, bureaucrats measure their status by how big their budget is and how many people report to them. So cutting costs is not a high priority with public-service management. Further they are spending other people’s money—the public’s. As Milton Friedman has often pointed out, people are always notably generous when they are not spending out of their own pocket or with their own self-interest directly involved. So it is a lot easier to accede to labor demands in exchange for fig-leaf concessions than to engage in extended knock-down-drag-out negotiations. Meanwhile, public-service labor unions have every incentive to demand the sun and the moon and the stars, because they are likely to get much of what they want. The results over the long term, inevitably, are contracts that would be laughed off the negotiating table in the private sector. I don’t have a tidy solution to this problem, and given the clout of public-service unions in the political system these days, I doubt there is one that could be enacted into law. But the current model is the problem and needs to go.
December 14, 2005
Keens and the Missing Mutton Chop Posted by Richard F. Snow at 04:10 PM EST I was startled to learn today that a tangible link with the past I have several times enjoyed (not cheaply, but with far less expenditure than, say, a trip to Venice) is a fraud. This discovery also answered a question I’ve asked myself a number of times: Why, if it tastes so good, is mutton available only in one restaurant in a city in which you will have no difficulty finding a place that will serve you dogs’ eyes in rose water? In his review of Keens Steakhouse, the New York Time restaurant critic Frank Bruni reveals that the house’s famous mutton chop is not mutton at all! It hasn’t been for quite a while. Bruni explains that during World War II, “deprived Americans ate more mutton than they wanted, and as it later fell farther and farther out of fashion, getting fresh mutton of reliable quality became iffy. At some point Keens had to turn to lamb, choosing a cut with a winged shape that mimicked the mutton chop of yore.” I never saw that chop of yore, but I can tell you that what Keens puts before you in its stead is a highly impressive piece of architecture, tall, oval—and delicious. But even if the dish were still capable of disgusting a country that had managed to accustom itself to Spam casserole, Keens would be well worth a visit. The restaurant stands today where it has since 1885, at 72 West 36th Street, just east of Sixth Avenue. It is a marvel. Here is how the amiable restaurateur George Rector (himself the son of the owner of the famous turn-of-the-century Manhattan restaurant Rector’s) described it in 1939: “On its way uptown, New York’s entertainment district paused at Fourteenth Street, leaving Luchow’s [the greatest of the city’s now all-but-vanished German restaurants] behind it, moved on to Twenty-third Street, Madison Square . . . and paused again at Thirty-fourth Street, Herald Square, before it reached its present magnificence at Times Square. It was while Herald Square was flourishing with theaters instead of Macy’s that Keen’s took root and grew. Across the street was the stage door to the old Garrick Theater, and the Lambs Club was in the same building. In fact, the Lambs were there first, and, when the chop house opened, John Drew, William Gillette, Clyde Fitch, and many others were its first, and thereafter regular, patrons. “In keeping with this theatrical heritage, the walls are now decorated with old prints of the theater and old playbills . . . dating back to the earliest days of the American theater. All of these are of great interest . . . but the most notable of all, no doubt, is the program President Abraham Lincoln held in his hands at Ford’s Theater on the night he was assassinated by the actor John Wilkes Booth.” They’re all still there, just as Rector describes them. And so are the pipes: “Another extraneous feature of interest is the hundreds, if not thousands, of clay pipes racked along the beamed ceilings. In a chop house, after a good, substantial dinner, men of arts and letters like to sit about the table and talk things over while they smoke their pipes. I don’t know why anyone would ever want to smoke a clay pipe—perhaps it is because men look so philosophical while doing it—but anyway, they did at Keen’s, and it was hard to get the pipe there and home again without breaking its long, fragile stem. And so the custom developed of leaving the pipe in the charge of mine host. The pipe was given a number, the number was registered in the name of the owner, and the pipe was stowed safely in its rack to await another visit.” This pipe register, says Rector, contains “a good many signatures that are autographs,” among them those of that inseparable duo Theodore Roosevelt and Eamon de Valera, George M. Cohan, of course, and, joining them in recent years, Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Liza Minnelli and Stephen King. “For all its memories, no restaurant can thrive much past the day of its last good meal,” Rector goes on, and, like the rest of his 66-year-old observations, this one holds true. Frank Bruni liked his meal at Keens, and you will like yours. Of course, there have been changes—but remarkably few. Even though the restaurant stood closed for years during New York’s disconsolate late 1970s, it is again the place Clyde Fitch would have recognized. The posters and playbills still sing their ancient shrillnesses from the walls, and the pipes hang in their skeletal infinities above you. The name has lost its apostrophe—for a century it was Keen’s—and it is no longer an “English Chop House” but a “Steakhouse.” The mutton chop is not, as it was billed on a 1937 menu, $1.65. But I know of no better place to get a sense of a vanished Manhattan, or a feeling of present well-being. If you can’t stay for the (non) mutton chop, go into the dark magnificence of the bar. You can still order the “suggestion of the day” for Friday, June 25, 1937: “TOM COLLINS Consisting of: 2 oz. Dry Gin; Half Lemon or Lime Juice; Sweetened with Sugar; Soda Water; Chopped Ice.” Just don’t expect to pay “35c.” for it.
December 14, 2005
The Death Penalty Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:40 AM EST Stanley Tookie Williams, a founder of the notorious Crips Gang in Los Angeles, was executed early yesterday morning in San Quentin Prison for four murders, after Governor Schwarzenegger declined to grant clemency and all appeals were exhausted. Many death-penalty opponents staged vigils both at the prison and at the Governor’s Los Angeles home, while vast national attention was paid to the case in the last week or so. I confess to being agnostic on the subject of the death penalty. On the one hand, I think it is possible for a person in possession of his faculties to commit a crime of such enormity as to justify the forfeit of his life. Adolf Hitler was not insane by any reasonable standard, but not many, I think, would say life in prison without possibility of parole would have been sufficient, given the blood of millions that was on his hands. Of course, Hitler cheated the hangman by suicide. One of his minions did not. Norway was one of the first countries in the world to abolish capital punishment, in 1905, and hadn’t actually executed anyone since 1876. But in 1945 the country was only too happy to hang Vidkun Quisling, who had betrayed Norway to the Nazis, subjecting it to five years of jackbooted horror. On the other hand, punishment, any punishment, is supposed to accomplish three purposes. The first is, hopefully, to rehabilitate the criminal, by making him see the error of his ways. The second is to assure that the perpetrator won’t commit such a crime in the future. The third is to dissuade others from committing such a crime, by giving an example of what happens to those who do. While the death penalty obviously does not rehabilitate, it absolutely guarantees that the individual will commit no more crimes. But is it effective as a deterrent? Not the way the system works today. Williams committed his crimes in 1979, 26 years ago. Let’s face it, most crimes are committed by people who aren’t very bright. Many of them probably have a time horizon of no more than a week. The possibility of being executed decades in the future simply doesn’t enter their calculations. It did not used to be this way. In February 1933 a man attempted to assassinate President-elect Franklin Roosevelt. He missed Roosevelt but fatally wounded the mayor of Chicago, with whom Roosevelt was talking. The assassin was caught on the spot, tried, and convicted. He was hanged in April 1933—barely two months later. So the death penalty doesn’t accomplish two of the three purposes of punishment. And there is an additional problem with it as well: Mistakes cannot be rectified. In the last decade or so, many people who have been incarcerated for horrendous crimes have been found to have been innocent by new evidence, often DNA, and released from prison. There can be no release from death. As far as I know, none of the thousand people (overwhelmingly men, of course) who have been executed since the death penalty was restored 30 years ago has subsequently been found to have been innocent, but it is only a matter of time. So in a practical sense, the death penalty doesn’t seem to work very well, except for crimes of state, such as Hitler and Quisling were guilty of. And those executions, essentially, have been about vengeance as much as justice. However the people in many states, including California, have consistently backed the death penalty, and politicians have ignored this at their peril. In 1986, when the California Supreme Court had been overturning every death penalty case that came before it on technicalities—because many of the justices were personally opposed to the death penalty—the people of California threw three of them off the bench, including Chief Justice Rose Bird. Since I am a small-D democrat, I believe the people should decide such matters, even when I don’t agree with them. So can the system by which the death penalty is meted out be improved, eliminating or at least greatly reducing the possibility of error and increasing its deterrent effect? Three changes would certainly help. 1) The usual legal standard for criminal conviction—beyond a reasonable doubt—is not sufficient. It should be a higher standard, essentially beyond any doubt. What exactly would constitute proof beyond any doubt, other than confession in open court, I will have to leave to lawyers and legal philosophers. But certainly all interrogations of suspects in a potential death penalty case should be videotaped as a matter of course. 2) Court-appointed attorneys for defendants should be of very high caliber and given the necessary resources to do their jobs thoroughly. The usual courthouse hacks are not enough. 3) The current system of appeals in death penalty cases simply does not work. It is being gamed, very successfully, to drag out the proceedings for as long as possible, in the case of Williams 26 years. Perhaps death-penalty cases should have their own appellant systems, at the state and federal levels, which deal exclusively with such cases and are specifically charged with moving them along as expeditiously as is consistent with justice. Appeals to state supreme courts and the U.S. Supreme Court should jump the queue in the interest of speed. The number of appeals at each level should be strictly limited, absent compelling new evidence. I suspect that in the fullness of time the death penalty will go the way of hanging, drawing, and quartering for treason and burning at the stake for heresy. But until that time we should at least make it as effective and just as possible.
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