Perhaps two tourists allegedly fooled into paying $200 each to get to Staten Island found the idea of a free ferry too fundamentally un-American. But in fact New York City has a real socialist side

New York has been stunned by the tale of two tourists who were allegedly charged $200 each by a conman for a trip on the Staten Island ferry, which is free.

“These suckers are the reason the $30 hot dog exists,” declaimed an unsympathetic New York Post. (The alleged conman, Gregory Reddick, is suing over his arrest.)

The commuter boat across New York Bay from Manhattan has been free since 1997, when mayor Rudy Guiliani removed the 50¢ fare to court Staten Island voters ahead of his successful bid for re-election that year. “I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon, but we do have concerns,” said a spokeswoman for the Staten Island Ferry Riders Committee at the time. “Will it attract more homeless? And what about kids who just want a free boat trip?”

But perhaps the allegedly swindled tourists were so easily fooled because the whole concept of a free ferry seems so fundamentally un-American; the idea that it might cost $400 for you and your companion to get across the water and back is actually almost more plausible than the notion you could take the trip for free.

In fact, though, the free ferry is just one aspect of a surprisingly socialist side to a city better known as an engine of unfettered free trade and cutthroat commerce: communal on-street facilities to wash your clothes, a bike-share system that would be the pride of Amsterdam, enormous free outdoor swimming pools such as the one in Highbridge Park, a pay-only-what-you’re-able-to admission fee at the city’s most prestigious museum (“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”), rent controls or rent stabilisation on over a million apartments, central heating that is switched on from October to May and then switched off from May to October, just like in Soviet Moscow.

New York even has something close to a communist full-employment scheme, with a vast army of traffic police superfluously helping drivers navigate spacious one-way streets; greeters, seaters, servers, maître d’s, busboys, barmen and waitresses in every restaurant and diner; and someone to print you a ticket to pass to another colleague to pass to another colleague at every major tourist attraction – even at the Central Park ice rink run by that so-called capitalist Donald Trump, which even the dopiest Apprentice contestant could probably run more efficiently.

It’s as if the Berlin Wall never came down.