Ian, Ryan, about the NYPD: One thing that makes it so frustrating is that it was all so predictable. Every issue of City Journal predicted it, or virtually did so. Heather Mac predicted it, or feared it. Myron Magnet predicted it, or feared it. I wrote a weeklong series on the matter, I think — the summer before the mayoral election.

If you listened to conservative websites and blogs — this used to burn me — you got the idea that the most important thing about Mayor Bloomberg was that he tried to ban Big Gulps. He was the Nanny, you see.

Yes, that was an unfortunate aspect of him. But the Big Gulps and the trans fats and all that were trivial, utterly trivial. The only thing that matters here is crime control. A world of good flows from effective crime control. A world of bad flows from its absence.

The most important thing about Bloomberg was that he was a scrawny, hard-nosed crime-controlling stud. He took what Giuliani handed him — that colossal, practically world-historic achievement — and built on it. You could practically sleep in Central Park.

And people who were too new to New York to know better, or too dense, took it for granted. They thought it was normal.

Anyway, I hope this Tom Wolfe novel will end before the chapters get really ugly. The moves against Big Gulps and trans fats were infringements on liberty. Crime committed against you, your neighbors, or your city — big, big infringement.

Of course, if you talk this way, people call you “Big Brother” and whatnot. Why don’t I move to North Korea? Mussolini made the trains run on time, you know?

I don’t know why there should be a great big argument between liberty-lovers (self-styled) and the poh-lice. Without the men in blue, your liberty is pretty much caput.