Mayor Bloomberg is calling George Steinbrenner a “quintessential New Yorker.” If so, that’s too bad for New York. Overlooked in all the encomiums to the late Yankee owner is this:
He was constantly threatening to leave New York City unless he got the conditions he wanted
That’s from former Mayor Koch. Steinbrenner made a career of extracting subsidies from New York City. Only recently, the new Yankee Stadium was financed to the tune of $1.2 billion of public subsidies. (See this excellent post several years ago by Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy.) George Will apparently once wrote that Steinbrenner “overflow[ed] with the animal spirits that fuel capitalism in its rawer forms.” If Steinbrenner was a capitalist then give me socialism! He made a fortune through corporate welfare of the most egregious kind. Too bad Major Koch didn’t tell Steinbrenner to take his Yankees elsewhere.
cxb 
SteveM 
“Too bad Major Koch didn’t tell Steinbrenner to take his Yankees elsewhere.”
Eh, I don’t know that I’d go that far.