Last weekend, Pittsburghers pillaged their nearest Giant Eagle, stashing bread and toilet paper to prepare for Winter Storm Fern. Unsurprisingly, the City of Pittsburgh was not as diligently fortified as its private residents.
After Fern deposited just shy of a foot of snow over the city, nearly 40 percent of the city plows broke down. Not even a foot of snow was enough to render 37 of 95 City of Pittsburgh plows inoperable.
Surely, after Allegheny County’s 36 percent increase in property taxes in 2025, residents could expect safe commutes into town days after a snow storm. Allegheny County—home of Pittsburgh—is the 14th most highly-taxed county in Pennsylvania. Despite taxing its residents more than 80 percent of the state, it is incapable of delivering even the most rudimentary functions of local government—maintenance and safety.
What did the city resort to in order to resolve its gross incompetence? On Tuesday, January 26, Mayor Corey O’Connor declared a state of emergency. This state of emergency was required to emancipate the government from the shackles of its own bureaucracy to permit itself to hire “contractors.” “Contractors” are what the government calls private citizens who can do their job better than it can.
This SOS by the government to private citizens is a decadently rich example of why free markets are superior. Anything the government can do, the private sector does better. The private plows saved the day and are the perfect answer to the ever-popular progressive question of, “If we don’t have a big government, who will take care of the roads?” Apparently, even with a big government, private enterprise takes care of the roads.
Driving in downtown Pittsburgh after Winter Storm Fern ought to remind every commuter the smaller the purview of government, the better. The snow maintenance performance by the city was so poor that local companies are donating millions of dollars, on top of a 7.49 percent corporate tax rate, to ensure that employees can arrive safely at work in the winter.
Is the City of Pittsburgh destitute? Is the slush fund running dry, leaving slush on the streets? Of course, dollars are not the issue, the incentive structure is.
Our friends on the Left love to bark about the horrors of “monopoly” when highly-successful companies provide thousands of jobs and valuable products and services that make our lives better via voluntary exchange but fail to recognize the monopoly they worship: government.
No matter how many millions of dollars donated by gift or coerced by taxes the government receives—for education, healthcare, or snow maintenance—it will never have an incentive to deliver a superior product to the public because it has no competition. This is by design.
The next time your Ivy League educated acquaintance begins to froth at the mouth with excitement over the warmth of Mamdani’s collectivism, tell them about Winter Storm Fern in Pittsburgh and who came to the rescue.
