New York’s Empire State
Development Corporation has
enlisted the Oscar®-caliber talents of Robert De Niro to
provide voiceover for a new commercial claiming the state is back
in business. Over scenes of the kind of businesses (energy
“highways,” high-tech “centers”) we now know for sure can only be
built by government, the weight-gain pioneer with a whopping 94
screen credits intones: 

There’s a new New York, one that’s working to attract business
and create jobs…nurture start ups and small businesses, reduce tax
burdens and provide the lowest middle class tax rate in 58 years.
Once again, New York State is a place where innovation meets
determination, and where businesses lead the world. The new New
York works for business; find out how it can work for yours.

What could be the problem with a major Hollywood star talking up
the benefits of low taxes and a pro-business public
climate? 

Well for one, a public agency with any variant of the word
“Development” in its title is like a country with the word
“Democratic” in its title: In practice it does the opposite of what
it says. 

At CEI’s
Open Market blog, Matt Patterson lists some other problems with
the new New York: 

Really, who is De Niro kidding? After admitting (tacitly, at any
rate) in the aforementioned commercial that decades of left-wing
tax-and-spend policies have driven New York industry into the
ditch, has the gall to pretend to Milton Friedman-esque
pronouncements on the benefits of low tax rates. Is this a policy
prescription he picked up from his wide ranging experience
campaigning/advocating for such free-market luminaries
as Bill
Clinton and Barack
Obama?

Bobby D. and NYS have some nerve. In fact, New York ranks 50th –
that’s dead
last — in CEI’s “Big Labor vs. Taxpayers Index,” with a
24.2 percent total union density, and a whopping 70.5 percent
public-sector unionization rate. No wonder: New York is a state
that tolerates — nay, encourages — forced unionization. Hey Bobby,
go ask one of those “start ups” New York is intent on ”nurturing”
how good it is for business to allow unions access to the company
coffers.

But, you say, unionization rates and labor policy are only part
a state’s larger economic picture. True enough. According to the
Mercatus Center’s “Freedom in the 50
States,“ which “comprehensively ranks the American states on
their public policies that affect individual freedoms in the
economic, social, and personal spheres,” New York is — gasp! — dead
last.

I think it’s uncharitable of Patterson to call De Niro the ”
star of such classic motion pictures as Analyze That,
The Adventures of Rocky Bullwinkle, Meet the
Fockers, and Shark Tale.” But I have to admit that in
this ad De Niro does seem to be doing what he’s been doing more or
less steadily since Jackie Brown wrapped: phoning it in.
(By contrast, Al Pacino, De Niro’s Italian-American neo-realist
counterpart from the seventies, continues to give his all to even
the most hilariously crappy material and is always worth watching,
as either an actor or a special effect. These days he’s the North
Dakota to De Niro’s Empire State.)