Rick Perlstein Quotes
Bill de Blasio was swept to the New York mayoralty on the promise of getting Gracie Mansion out from under the thumb of corporate elites.
Perlstein, Rick. "The De Blasio Era." The Nation, 2014.
This was a serious problem in major cities in the 1930s but became much worse over time as the cities grew and real estate values escalated. In modern times the problem even spread to affluent suburbs where the police, fire fighters, teachers, and other civil servants can often not afford to live in the community that they serve.
One important observation of this quotation is the pejorative language Mises used to describe “Union Bosses” as opposed to “Union Leaders.” There were indeed a few Union “Bosses” but most unions had popularly elected leaders. It is similar to the left wing critic who refers to Corporate Executives as “Greedy Monopolists.” A few are but most are not. Historically, in the last half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, the conservatives tended to be much better at pejorative language and used it more frequently and uniformly than the liberals who tended to be better in the last part of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
At the time of this quotation, the nation had gone through more than 3 decades of enormous increase in prosperity for the wealthy, and modest gains for the highly skilled, technically trained workers. However, correcting for inflation, average salaries did not increase at all. The middle class was particularly hard hit. Only 20 percent of the population benefitted from the growth at all; however, the 1 percent had rarely prospered more. Kenworthy’s principle did not apply for this period of American history.
We are still grappling with the distribution of wealth issue.
He was the elected Mayor of London at the time.
Eric S. Perlstein is an American historian and journalist who has garnered recognition for his chronicles of the 1960s and 1970s, and the American conservative movement. The author of three bestselling books, Perlstein received the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. Politico has dubbed him "a chronicler extraordinaire of modern conservatism."
