Welcome to the New New York City!

I thought I knew Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s new mayor, but I didn’t. My hope was that he was just another Bernie-clone promising free stuff who would move more to the less toxic liberal wing when he took office.

I was wrong. He’s the real deal socialist, disturbingly so. He revealed his true colors in his inaugural speech. He proclaimed that he would rule as a democratic socialist. He takes guidance from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) of which he is a member. You should check out their website. It is about as hardline as a socialist could be. It’s all about Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto. Nothing democratic about it.

Socialists, “democratic” or not, are utopians longing for a blissful socialist future. I don’t even have to do much to discredit this zany philosophy by merely pointing out those dirt-poor authoritarian regimes around the world who have embraced socialism. Socialist intellectuals who have the freedom to express their views (in capitalist countries) always excuse socialism’s failure. “It’s not real socialism” they say. But it’s always real socialism. The same philosophy whose adherents have murdered hundreds of millions of their countrymen in the drive for doctrinal socialist purity.

Real socialism is nothing more than the quest for power by evil, ignorant men. It never works as they planned and they ultimately resort to violence to force their citizens to conform to doctrine. They are evil people believing in an evil philosophy.

Mamdani is charming, young, articulate, and telegenic. How could he possibly be an evil man?

“Evil” is a strong word to level at anyone. But what is “evil?”

If you really cared about workers, wouldn’t you want to educate yourself about the philosophy, economics, and history of the things that actually have bettered mankind? Things which require reason, logic, and empirical data to prove what works and what doesn’t. Why would you follow a philosophy that has a terrible track record?

Ever since we walked upright, poverty has been the plight of mankind. For millennia things never changed until the capitalist economic revolution. Those who embraced capitalism and the libertarian ideals of the Enlightenment (our Founders, for example) raised whole societies of workers out of poverty. Liberty and free markets created what is called the Great Enrichment. If you doubt me, please name one socialist country that isn’t mired in poverty, and ask yourself what the reason for that could be. Hint: It isn’t Sweden – they embraced capitalism. 

Mamdani sees people not as individuals but as members of groups (Blacks, Jews, Irish, Italians, Latinos, Muslims, Gay, trans, etc.). His pitch was that almost every worker in NYC is “oppressed,” held down by the “wealthy and well-connected.” He doesn’t like billionaires. He wants to put them in their place and make them atone for their sins by handing over their ill-gotten billions to pay for all his free stuff. Corporations, he says, “rip off consumers and employees alike” and, because of their greed, “are the cause of why wages don’t rise.” He even despises good grammar and civility which “masks agendas of cruelty” – whatever that means. The man obviously never studied economics.

The kicker of the speech was, “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” What he means by that is that successful entrepreneurs, the ones whose ideas created jobs and things people wanted, will be reined in and their assets taxed to the max, and a board of party functionaries will allocate this newfound capital to programs and businesses they favor (the “common good”). I think it’s called “central planning,” a concept that has brought mass poverty to socialist societies. 

I don’t think he’s just saying stuff to please those who supported him. He has revealed himself as very hardline and he will push hard for rent control and tenant rights over property owners’ rights. Ditto with free public transportation, free childcare, and government-run grocery stores. He’ll start a war against billionaires to pay for it. Many NY politicians see Mamdani as having the wind at his back.

Mamdani’s free-stuff utopian policies will ultimately fail as they always have. He’ll blame capitalism or that clandestine group that secretly controls everything (the “rich”) who sabotaged his dream of socialist progress. Socialists like Mamdani are either ignorant of philosophy, economics, and history, or they don’t care and just seek power. Or both. If they know it doesn’t work and they still impose a failed economic system which creates poverty, then – borrowing from Epicurus – whence comes evil? 

One million people voted for Mamdani. For the good of the city let’s hope his policies are rejected by the other eight million NYC citizens.