Next week, New York City voters almost surely will send self-proclaimed socialist Zohran Mamdani to Gracie Mansion, and he promises to impose several policies aimed at allegedly lowering the cost of living for New Yorkers. Like his progressive and socialist predecessors, Mamdani’s policies will fail spectacularly, but not before doing enormous damage to the city—something that neither he nor his supporters will acknowledge.
Although Mamdani and his supporters are touting his proposals—expanded rent control, more government housing, free bus transportation, free childcare, increasing taxes on the wealthy—as something new, they actually have been part of the progressive/socialist staple in American cities for more than half a century. Not surprisingly, the results of progressive rule have been predictably bad.
The failures of socialism are well-known and are often noted on this page. For that matter, Ludwig von Mises of the Austrian School wrote the definitive work on why a socialist system would ultimately run aground and no one has ever successfully refuted his arguments. Yet, the 10,000 enthusiastic Mamdani supporters that recently jammed a stadium in Queens, hearing campaign speeches not only from their hero but also from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders, would swear that this time, they will make socialism economically successful:
The election of Zohran is as important as our cause today,” Ocasio-Cortez said at the rally. “Child care, buses, rent and our rights, here in New York City — it is the jewel and the center of all that is possible in America.”
“And on Nov. 4,” she said, “we will prove it to the world, and we will prove it to the nation, and we will send a loud message to President Donald Trump that his authoritarianism is no good here.”
“This is America, New York City. Don’t let them tell you any different. Don’t let them tell you that we are the exception. We are the rule. We are the standard. We are the acceptance, and we set the bar for America,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I’m talking to you, Donald Trump.”
Sanders also got into the act, declaring:
At a moment when Americans are extremely distressed about where we are as a nation, economically and politically, a victory here in New York will give hope and inspiration to people throughout our country and throughout the world.
He added:
That is what this election is about, and that is why Donald Trump is paying attention to this election. Ordinary people, working class people, Black and white and Latino, Asian, gay and straight, coming together to take on the oligarchy that is Trump’s worst nightmare.
Contra Sanders, however, this election is not about so-called working people fighting the rich oligarchs that are robbing them of their birthright. As journalist Matt Taibbi notes in a recent Substack post, the leaders of the latest democratic socialist movement are not people from the working classes, but rather leftists from wealthy backgrounds complete with attendance at highly-exclusive and expensive prep schools.
Writing about another so-called working class democratic socialist running for the Democratic Party nomination in Maine for US Senate, Taibbi writes:
I almost died laughing when I read that Graham Platner, the “progressive warrior poet” running for Senate in Maine, went to school at Hotchkiss, one of a handful of prep schools in the Northeast more precious and exclusive than my own Concord Academy. The original comic appeal of the Platner story was in watching the legacy press mouthpieces who denounced Pete Hegseth’s “Crusader Cross” pec-tattoo rally to the defense of Platner’s Nazi Death’s Head tat, which he got in Split, Croatia, while he was so wasted.That’s been hilarious, but the Free Beacon story about the “warrior poet” with accidental Nazi ink who went to a $75,000 high school describes a political scam of chef’s kiss perfection.
Taibbi continues:
Even more incredible is how far and wide the humble origins tag has flown, with everyone from The New Yorker to the Washington Post to Bernie Sanders and Politico selling him as a “candidate from the working class” taking on the big, bad establishment. It should have been a major red flag that even Bon Appétit ran a gullible feature on Platner’s journey from “working class fisherman to Maine’s Zohran Mamdani,” but I still didn’t catch it, underestimating the sheer stones behind this marketing gambit:
While it is true that New York City has become increasingly expensive, especially for low-income families, the idea that Mamdani can command a lower cost of living into existence, turning NYC into the socialist paradise he promises in his campaign speeches is a non-starter. But, while the city has become unaffordable for many families, Mamdani is not winning because of support from lower income, working families.
Instead, Mamdani’s main appeal is to young college graduates and the young professionals that make up a large proportion of the city’s voters, many of whom come from relatively affluent backgrounds. Furthermore, many of them went to colleges and universities where Marxist rhetoric and trendy socialism are the order of the day. Taibbi writes:
The ideas currently fashionable among upper-class lefties are suicidal lunacies that will force actual working class Americans to vote against them out of self-preservation. What’s depressing for me is that I know exactly how this happened. Only people who can afford the kinds of schools Platner and I attended can afford to be as detached from reality as the new progressives have become.
While thousands of Mamdani supporters chanted “Tax the rich” at the recent Queens rally, one gets the sense that most of them would like to become rich, or at least enjoy the comforts afforded to people who are truly wealthy. However, they also believe they need to publicly hold viewpoints that ally them with those considered poor or marginalized, or what often are called “luxury beliefs.”
At the same time, many of them are feeling a real pinch from inflation and the economic slowdown and would not mind having some of the free stuff that Mamdani is proposing. Moreover, who wouldn’t want a rent freeze—even if it does huge damage to the availability of housing in the long run? After all, there are six-figure student loans to pay, the hangover from spending four years at a prestigious, four-year college where critical theory and left-wing activism permeated campus life.
What NYC needs, of course, is what every municipality in this country needs: free markets, free movement of goods and labor, rollback of state interventions and regulations, and the right to engage in peaceful exchange with others. These are the things that would benefit the most people in New York, but these also are the things that politicians like Mamdani consider to be immoral.
More than eight years ago, I wrote that socialists may talk of providing a better life for people, but their real goal is control. To a true believing socialist, once the socialist system is implemented, all is well. While the economists with whom I have associated for most of my professional life, an economy is a means to an end, that end being a better life for people. Socialists disagree. I wrote:
A socialist does not and will not see things this way. The end of socialism is not a higher living standard or even making life better for the poor, as much as a socialist will talk about the well-being of poor people. No, the end of socialism is socialism, or to better put it, the ideal of socialism. Once socialism is established, as it was in Venezuela or in the former USSR or Cuba, the social ideal had been met no matter what the actual outcome might be.
In fact, this is true with nearly all government intervention into the economy, whether it be Trump’s tariffs or Obamacare. The tariffs have had a devastating impact on the economy, but no one in power cares about removing them. Likewise, the so-called Affordable Healthcare Act has made healthcare less affordable, but even to publicly question Obamacare is seen in some circles as being a secular heresy.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that Mamdani will implement a number of failed measures when he becomes mayor of New York. The outcomes are predictable, but that will not matter to his political supporters, as his candidacy has taken on the trappings of a cult.
Housing shortages will get worse, the existing housing stock will deteriorate, public transportation will also decline, and Mamdani, AOC, Sanders, and the New York Times will blame capitalism and use these things to demand further expansion of government intervention. Nonetheless, these sure-to-come economic horror stories are inevitable and economically necessary even if those that caused them will never admit what they’ve done.
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