On Friday, communist New York Mayor Bill De Blasio attacked DNAinfo and Gothamist owner Joe Ricketts for shutting down the outlets a week after employees decided it would be wise to unionize despite a complete lack of profit at the institutions. De Blasio tweeted:
This is insipid. The Leftist notion that “bravery” has something to do with profitability is utterly inane. Profitability springs from running a business that generates enough voluntary transactions to create a revenue stream, and spending less on that business than the revenue stream. Continuing to blow through credit in order to prop up a weak revenue stream isn’t brave, it’s counterproductive. And it’s even more counterproductive for employees, knowing that revenue is down, to attempt to raise the cost of running the business through unionization.
But De Blasio, like many on the Left, believes that basic economics should reflect an arbitrary moral code. That’s why Joe Biden has said that paying more taxes is somehow more patriotic; it’s why the Left went nuts when businesses began laying people off due to additional Obamacare costs; it’s why Democrats never seem to understand why businesses use part-time labor after minimum wage regulations hit the books. All of that is immoral and uncaring.
Except it isn’t. Numbers aren’t immoral and they aren’t uncaring. They’re just numbers. And the numbers either work or they don’t.
But De Blasio’s moral posturing is comforting to those who can’t make their numbers. It allows them to believe that they’re only losing their jobs thanks to individual malevolence, not to lack of marketability in their product. Until De Blasio is willing to put his own money where his mouth is and hire the laid-off journalists of Gothamist, he ought to shut up about what other people do in terms of hiring and firing — especially while he makes doing business in New York City ever more expensive.