The question is not whether they were accommodated or not the question - for example, people in wheelchairs could have been accommodated in nearby buildings or in restaurants or the like. So when New York wanted to put in public toilets, which are desperately needed in New York City, and they found a unit which was small enough to fit on the crowded sidewalks, the disabled came in and said, 'Sorry, wheelchairs don't fit in them therefore, you can't do them.' New York City still has no public toilets because 0.2 percent, or whatever it is, of the population that are in wheelchairs couldn't use them. If you pass a law, which the disabled laws are, giving the disabled an absolute right to equal access to any public facility, what it means is that they have essentially a credit card to force anybody to do anything that doesn't comport with this open-ended mandate. HOWARD: A classic example of why the technique of rights are nothing that a democracy should use to try to balance competing interests.

It wasn't rich versus poor it wasn't whether government had a role or not it was something about the way government worked. That afternoon, as the lady was telling me the story, I realized that she and this CEO were basically the same person and that something had gone wrong. The interesting thing to me in the story was I had spent the morning with the CEO of a major company describing his effort to work on a jobs program with the government, and as he was telling the story he couldn't even get them to respond to the issues and the questions, and as he told the story, his face had twisted in frustration. She was humiliated by this experience of no one really honestly responding to her problem. Her face, as she was telling the story, twisted in frustration. Then she went to the third bureaucrat, who then referred her back to the first bureaucrat. Go to someone else,' and she went to the second.

And what she said was that she had called up a bureaucrat who said, 'No, I don't have responsibility. HOWARD: Well, the story was, she was describing her problems in getting her refrigerator fixed in public housing.

Frustration by charlotte lamb