Greenburgh NY  teaming up with DocGo, the purveyor of the clot shot, turned migrant contractor now under investigation by the otherwise off the wall AG asking local restaurants to provide 5,250 $11 meals every week for three local migrant motels

From the Desk of PAUL FEINER

Greenburgh Town Supervisor

LOOKING FOR LOCAL RESTAURANTS WHO WOULD BE INTERESTED IN BIDDING ON CONTRACT TO PREPARE 3 MEALS A DAY FOR MIGRANTS STAYING AT HOTELS IN ARDSLEY, WHITE PLAINS

 

ASYLUM SEEKERS HAVE BEEN COMPLAINING ABOUT POOR QUALITY OF FOOD---DOCGO PROMISES TO FIND LOCAL VENDORS WHO WILL IMPROVE FOOD QUALITY During the past seven weeks 46 Greenburgh student interns have been focusing part of their internships assisting asylum seekers who are staying at an Ardsley hotel. A picnic for the migrants was held last week. Some of the students have been teaching migrants English. Some are involved in a food drive.

 

A few weeks ago two student interns appeared before the Greenburgh Town Board advising the Board that the asylum seekers were complaining about the poor quality of the food--which they were told was not eatable. We reached out to DocGo and have some good news to report:

An official at DocGo  who I spoke with today indicated that the company which is being paid to serve the migrants will work hard to improve the quality of meals delivered.  We are looking to find restaurants who can provide the following:

 

THIS IS THE MEMO I RECEIVED FROM DOCGO A SHORT TIME AGO " we will put together something with our marketing team for RFPs. For now, if we can start finding local restaurants that we can start rotating in weekly for special lunches and dinners.

 

Please let anyone you know that might be interested in the following:

 

Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner options

Budget of $11 per meal

Food must be delivered

Hot food is great, if served cold please make sure its in a microwave safe container NYC Dietary Guidelines Latin American dishes, Venezuelan dishes, Halal dishes, Spanish dishes, all great options Individual meals are great and preffered, catering cafeteria style is an option, like the picnic.

 

3 locations that could benefit from local establishments:

 

90 individuals – Ardsley Acres Hotel Court – 560 Saw Mill River Pkwy, Ardsley, NY 10706

 

100 individuals – Central Motel Courtyard- 441 Central Ave. White Plains, NY 10606

 

60 individuals – El Rancho – 3701 White Plains Rd. Bronx, NY 10467

 

If you know of restaurants or caterers who can meet these requirements please e mail me at pfeiner@greenburghny.com. I will immediately contact DocGo with your contact info.

 

I would like to thank Town Clerk Judith Beville for coordinating the summer internship program and Ardsley Mayor Nancy Kaboolian, Congressman Jamaal Bowman and Kathy Wolf for working with the summer interns on this initiative -trying to help the asylum seekers have a better quality of life while they are in our community.

PAUL FEINER

Greenburgh Town Supervisor

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Britain’s foxes are victims of good intentions.

How the UK’s 2004 Ban on Fox Hunting Led to a ‘Catastrophic Decline’ in the Fox Population

Britain’s foxes are victims of good intentions.

Thursday, May 11, 2023

Image Credit: iStock

 

Lawrence W. Reed

History Bans Hunting Animals Endangered animals Intentions Good Intentions Results vs Intentions UK

Every day the world over, good intentions cover up a multitude of sins.

A visitor from another planet could hardly fail to notice that humans seem to care more about motives than results, and when results achieve the opposite of the intended effect, we’re rarely as quick to reverse course as we were to embark on the wrong path in the first place.

“God save us from people who mean well,” wrote the novelist Vikram Seth in A Suitable Boy.

This is not to recommend bad intentions, but rather, to recognize that good ones can be even worse, depending on outcomes.

Among the latest victims of good intentions are the foxes of Great Britain (the four-legged kind). A story written by correspondent Hayley Dixon published in the The Telegraph on Tuesday reveals a “catastrophic decline” in fox populations since the 2004 passage of a ban on hunting them. Red foxes in particular face extinction in certain rural areas.

More than 100 veterinarians from around the UK have signed a letter which points out, “Advocates of the 2004 ban on hunting would not have expected their efforts to protect foxes to result in this catastrophic decline.” Oops.

Prior to enacting the ban, Parliament spent 700 hours debating it. That was more time than it deliberated over the invasion of Iraq the year before. Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair went along with it but in his autobiography six years later, he revealed that the Hunting Act of 2004 was “one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret.” On a vacation in Italy a few years after its passage, he ran into a lady hunter who persuaded him that the ban was a mistake:

She took me calmly and persuasively through what they (the fox hunts) did, the jobs that were dependent on it, the social contribution of keeping the hunt and the social consequence of banning it and did it with an effect that completely convinced me.

Nearly 20 years since the ban took effect, and 13 years since Blair saw the light, the ban is exacting a terrible toll on the fox population.

What went wrong?

The activists and the “armchair authorities” in Parliament, it turns out, had commissioned no scientific research on the question. Fox hunts were bad, no fox hunting would be good. Such virtue-signaling beating of the breasts was enough to pass a law. But farmers, livestock ranchers and homeowners vexed by predatory foxes took matters into their own hands. Dixon’s article in The Telegraph cites the veterinarians in their recent letter:

The most humane method of controlling fox numbers should be based on selection for the weakest animals, minimizing the possibility of wounding and preventing the orphaning of dependent young. Perversely, hunting with hounds was much better at achieving this than any of today’s legal methods. The number of foxes killed in hunts was limited and the hunt dispersed the foxes that survived from sensitive areas…It is dispiriting that two decades ago, the debates on fox hunting were driven overwhelmingly by political instincts, and the need for scientific research was scarcely considered.

In the US, we’ve seen a similar effect from the Endangered Species Act of 1973. It’s called “shoot, shovel and shut up” because of the law’s perverse incentives. John Stossel provides details in this short but revealing video.

So before you embrace a course of action, no matter how emotionally convinced you are of its inherent virtue, it’s almost always a greater virtue to set your passionate intentions aside for a moment and consider what the results might be. Facts can be inconvenient and humbling too, but they trump intentions every time. To reinforce the point, here are a few further observations:

Without wisdom, all the good intentions in the world amount to nothing. Intending to do good without having wisdom is like intending to fly an airplane with no knowledge of airplanes or the laws of aerodynamics. Good intentions without wisdom lead to either nothing or to actual evil ― Dennis Prager

And good intentions? These scared him the most: people with good intentions tended not to question themselves. And people who didn't question themselves, in the scientific world and beyond, were the ones to watch out for ― Shanthi Sekaran

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth ― C. S. Lewis

For Additional Information, See:

The Economics of Good Intentions by Joe Cobb

3 Policies with Good Intentions and Tragic Consequences by Corey Iacono

Law and Good Intentions by Andrew P. Morriss

America’s Entitlement State and the Failure of Good Intentions by Joseph Sunde

The Good Intentions Fallacy is Driving Support for Democratic Socialism by Barry Brownstein

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed is FEE's President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty, having served for nearly 11 years as FEE’s president (2008-2019). He is author of the 2020 book, Was Jesus a Socialist? as well as Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism. Follow on LinkedIn and Like his public figure page on Facebook. His website is www.lawrencewreed.com.

Why I Paid the Neighbor Kid $10 for a Simple Task

Why I Paid the Neighbor Kid $10 for a Simple Task, Even Though His Parents Said It Wasn't Necessary

Your value is in your whole person, not in just your “labor.”

Wednesday, May 10, 2023

 This article was originally published on FEE.org

 Scott Drylie

A mom in the neighborhood recently made trouble. Macroeconomic trouble. Here is a way to spot such trouble, and how to help nurture the goodness in our economic way of life.

A few months back her boy went door to door, confidently introducing himself, explaining his purpose, and handing us a detailed flier: “Twelve-year-old boy willing to work.” He was trying to earn money to go to sailing school. I was impressed. My wife was impressed. We told our kids to be impressed.

There is virtue in hard work and initiative, and such virtue is doubled when it involves tweens and teens. I commend the boy and the mom—both of whom were complete strangers to me.

But then things turned bad. Not with the boy—he was great. I called him to bring our empty trash cans back up to the house one day when we would be out of town. I promised him ten dollars upon my return. He was thrilled and he performed the task with what I imagine was great alacrity. Never have my trash cans been so well brought up to the house.

Things turned bad when I got the text from Mom: “It was an easy task. No need to pay.”

A Dangerous Underlying Premise

I concede that the task was easy and ten dollars was very generous. Heck, I probably could have negotiated the boy down to five dollars! That he actually had a reservation wage of zero was both remarkable and a missed opportunity to avoid transgressing child labor laws.

I also readily concede that charity and neighborliness are lovely and important. But this was something else. The mom’s sequitur was “easy; ergo, free”—an analogue to the more familiar “hard; ergo, expensive.” In this, she had slipped into economic (and moral) reasoning that is everywhere in society and everywhere dangerous. Economists call it the labor theory of value.

In simple terms, the theory states that the amount of hard labor put into a product or service is what determines its value (and price).  The harder the work, the more value generated, and thus the more the worker should be remunerated. Sounds innocent enough.

Indeed, so easily does such logic enter into the brain that it is deeply embedded in our moral sensibility. It is the intuition telling us that the hard work and commitment of teachers ought to be better remunerated.  It is the impulse telling us that the per-throw, per-word, per-hour, and per-post earnings of, respectively, athletes, actors, CEOs and Instagram personalities is unjustly high.

The mom clearly calculated the effort of the boy and was embarrassed that the effort did not align with the remuneration.  She wanted the boy to learn the value of hard work. What was there to learn in this easy-money situation? Maybe something unseemly.

Neoclassical Economic Perspective

I saw the learning opportunity differently.  His mom and I were going to wrestle for the soul of this child and for the future of our economic order.

Value, as most economists recognize since the marginal revolution of the late nineteenth century, is not actually determined by calculating the number of hours of production.  Rather, value is determined by the customer—by how much the customer appreciates the product relative to availability. Value is inherently subjective.

In what will be known as the “trash can debacle of 2023,” I clearly and dearly valued trash can service.  Trash cans on the curb would signal absence and invite ne’er-do-wells to break in and steal my lovely tchotchkes and shiny baubles. I would have paid twenty dollars.  Geesh, maybe more!

The boy got lucky by my conundrum. But this luck was not without merit. He was an entrepreneur. He came up with the idea, developed excellent flyers, and then built up the courage to go door-to-door and look complete strangers in the eye and make an impression. He also had to remember that between prealgebra and LEGOs he had to retrieve trash cans in the cold.  Heck, he was probably anxious about it for days!

The labor theory of value errs by directing us to calculate the most visible. But there was much more benefit to me than could be gleaned in the easy movement of empty objects.   And much more went into moving those empty objects than walking the twenty yards to my house.   As Roman philosopher Seneca (and renowned football coach and plagiarist Vince Lombardi) stated, “Luck is when opportunity meets preparation.”

An Alternative Morality

Thus my moral contribution to this child’s upbringing: Your value is in your whole person, not in just your “labor.”  Your ideas will have value in today’s society. Your gumption will have value.  Your character too. Figure out what the world appreciates. You will earn well and improve the lot of others.

Adam Smith saw morality in such wealth-seeking spirit.  The twelve-year-old boy was my butcher or brewer or baker that day. He did not offer me services out of a charitable spirit, but rather out of a selfish spirit to get to sailing school. And that is ok. Look at the outcome, not the intention. He effectively provided me alms (or what economists call “consumer surplus”).

Smith was born three hundred years ago this year. His kind of moral thinking threatened the monopoly of political and spiritual leaders of his time. It does the same today. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would like you to think that we often exchange money for the alienated souls of laborers. Pope Francis insists that labor transactions are “win-lose” events between haves and have-nots.

My exchange with the boy says otherwise. In markets, we exchange wants for provisions, needs for fulfillments, and dreams for realizations.  We are all have-nots becoming haves, and haves providing to have-nots.

Continuing Education

In the end, I paid the boy and did not preach. The morality of the market is often learned simply by participating in it.

If the boy and I continue to do business together this year, we will both be better off. Moreover, to ensure continued transactions, he will likely keep himself upstanding and I will likely avoid being a boor and a brute (this article notwithstanding).

This upcoming year my neighborhood will experience a demonstration of Smith’s invisible hand as well as Montesquieu’s doux commerce. It is a demonstration replicated over and over across free societies—one where diverse strangers meet, solve each other’s disparate problems, and behave in ways that lend to tolerance, democracy, peace, and trust.

Such a society is a cause worth donating to. So find that neighborhood kid willing to work, and make sure to pay. You will be nurturing the miraculous sentiment that trade has its virtues. In doing so, you will be paying it forward for all of us.

This Mises Institute article was republished with permission. 

Scott Drylie

Scott Drylie is an Assistant Professor of Economics, Cost Analysis, and Acquisition Management at the Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton, Ohio.

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