Quote of the day—Bill de Blasio

What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development.

Bill de Blasio
New York City Mayor
August 2017
[That explains a lot. He has more in common with Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin than John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

Expect similar differences in outcomes as well.—Joe]

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10 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Bill de Blasio

  1. … who gets to live in it, …

    I’m sorry this dacha is reserved for senior party members.

  2. The young and the poor are most easily convinced that wholesale, legalized theft is a splendid idea. They don’t understand until it’s too late that if you can “legally” rob, you can also, “legally”, BE ROBBED, and that if you don’t have a right to property, you don’t have a right to life either.

    “…Thou shalt not steal.

    Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

    Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.”

    Let’s make that “thousands of years”, not merely hundreds. God’s law firmly and succinctly asserts property rights. Don’t steal, and don’t even want (covet) what is not yours.

    Your neighbor’s house, wife, servants, ox, and ass. Together those things constitute a right to commerce also, the means of production (your neighbor with his servants and ox) and his means of transportation (ass) being clearly protected from even being wanted by anyone else, much less taken.

    Mess with God’s law on a wholesale level, and people suffer and die on a wholesale level. You may not fully embrace that concept, but rest assured that those in the seats of power in the world understand this stuff quite thoroughly. So it is that when they attempt to sell socialism to the public, they’re attempting mass murder of a sort, right there and then, in the very act of the selling of the idea. That would include the pope, by the way, among others.

    • What if I see something I’d like, that belongs to my neigbbor; but instead of wanting to take it from him, it motivates me to work and save so that I can get one for my own?

      I suspect there’s some nuance in ‘covet’ that gets lost in translation.

      • Could be. It wouldn’t be the first time that a Bible text is puzzling in English (or Latin) but clear in the original Greek or Hebrew. “Thou shalt not murder” is a well known example. The bit about “live by the sword, die by the sword” is another not so well known one. Rolf had fun with that one in Heretics of St. Possenti.

  3. Socialism is great, as long as you’re one of the chosen few who get to determine what is best for the people.

  4. He got elected. What percentage of New Yorkers agree with him? I’m thinking a new age redevelopment of that area would be a good thing. All that is really needed is the port facilities. Screw him and his fellow thinkers.

  5. Legal plunder, as Bastiat called it. Who’ll benefit? Oh, the people in government calling the shots and doing the plundering, of course. That’s why De Blasio is waxing so poetically about it, if only he had more power to plunder people…..

  6. Socialism’s greatest weakness, basic human nature.

    That which belongs to everyone belongs to no one.

  7. “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” – Gerald Ford

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