Noah Smith Quotes
The most important thing blue cities need to understand and internalize is that anarchy is not a form of welfare. Many progressives believe that any actions to curb urban disorder — restrictions on sidewalk tents, making people pay for public transit, arresting people for nonviolent crime, and so on — represent the exclusion of marginalized people from public life. In the absence of a full-service cradle-to-grave welfare state, progressives think they can redistribute urban utility from the rich to the poor by basically letting anyone do anything they want. But in fact, permissiveness toward the behaviors that create urban disorder destroy more value than they redistribute. When you don’t make people pay for public transit, you scare people off the train, thus causing the train to go bankrupt. Pretty soon neither the rich nor the poor have a train, and everyone is screwed. This is the tragedy of the commons.
He was a major critic of Socialism but he did acknowledge that the Socialist Movement had made major contributions.
Noah Smith is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist who received his PhD in economics from the University of Michigan after majoring in physics as an undergraduate at Stanford University. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and is an active economics blogger on Noahpinion.
