OPINION:
Of the many inane comments that socialists have made this year, the one that democracy is “the building block of socialism” might be the most absurd.
Who made the comment? You guessed it: New York City’s boy genius, Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
In a recent episode of “This Past Weekend,” Mr. Mamdani discussed socialism’s ability to ensure affordability with comedian Theo Von. The interview was replete with Marxian nonsense, but Mr. Mamdani also discussed many Americans’ economic frustrations: homeownership feels out of reach; rent is expensive; childcare is unaffordable; and grocery prices are substantially higher.
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Young people increasingly feel that the American dream is “slipping away.”
Recognizing affordability problems, however, is not the same as identifying the causes. Mr. Mamdani avers that the free market system cannot solve these problems and that socialism is the silver bullet.
Consider his assertion about democracy. When Mr. Von brought up the concept, Mr. Mamdani interrupted him and claimed, “That’s the building block of socialism.”
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would like to have a word.
To them, it was clear that implementing socialism — a word that they used interchangeably with communism — would require the opposite of democracy: tyranny.
In their 1848 “The Communist Manifesto,” the owner’s manual for Marxism, Marx and Engels rightly predicted that people would fight back when the government seized their property — something Mr. Mamdani should bear in mind as he upsets more and more New Yorkers with property-grabbing schemes.
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State,” Marx and Engels wrote. “Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production.”
So, no, Mr. Mamdani. Socialism’s pillars are totalitarian, based on forced nationalization and coercive state control.
Now, let us deal with the fanciful claim that socialism is the best way to order society: “Socialism to me means that you have whatever you need to live a dignified life, and it’s the government’s job to deliver on that.”
It sounds compassionate, but what happens when the government assumes responsibility for determining, financing and delivering the necessities of a “dignified life”?
Here, we begin to understand why Mr. Mamdani mixes socialism with democracy. To him, democracy is not just about electing leaders; it is also about letting people choose things that they cannot afford, courtesy of taxpayers.
In line with his big-government agenda, he explained socialism as “the extension of democracy from the ballot box to the rest of your life … your workplace, your home.”
Yet socialists devalue real democracy when they define it as the “right” for people to own what they have not earned. They also devalue the protection of inalienable rights when they insist that 51% of the electorate can suppress individual liberties such as property rights — something America’s Founders called “mobocracy.”
A free society empowers majorities, but it also protects individual rights. More government intervention will neither expand liberty nor make New York City more affordable.
The Big Apple is indeed the most expensive city in the United States and the third most expensive in the world. Mr. Mamdani said that is because “greed is baked into a lot of this economy.” He portrays capitalist profit incentives as a motive for firms to exploit workers, reduce the quality of goods and break the law.
Still, profit and wealth are not social defects to be discouraged; quite the contrary. In competitive markets, signals indicate that entrepreneurs have found ways to provide goods and services that consumers value. These incentives encourage businesses to innovate, produce more, reduce costs and discover better ways to meet people’s needs.
This must be a foreign concept to Mr. Mamdani, who believes that it is the government’s duty to provide the public with everything, from rent to groceries. He ignores commonsense solutions that have worked the world over, such as tax cuts and deregulation — and deportations, for that matter, which would reduce costs for households and businesses alike.
Instead, Mr. Mamdani turns to central planning, even though government bureaucrats created many of the affordability problems he now insists they will solve.
Take housing. Mr. Mamdani argues that housing costs are central to New York’s economic problems, and many economists agree. Yet the city’s affordability crisis results from decades of restrictive zoning, burdensome permit requirements, development constraints, rent regulation and political barriers that limit housing construction.
The pattern is familiar: Government intervention distorts the market, consumers suffer the consequences, then socialists point to those consequences as evidence of market failure requiring still more state intervention.
Throughout his interview with Mr. Von, Mr. Mamdani framed his socialist ideology as empathetic, not the state-controlled subjugation that it is. Yet remember, the more “necessities” the government promises to provide, the more power bureaucrats require to deliver them.
When the government assumes control over housing, childcare, grocery access, transportation and healthcare, citizens become less self-reliant and more dependent on political institutions.
Americans are right to be concerned about affordability, but the challenge facing them today is how to improve markets with more freedom and opportunity, not socialism.
• Nicole Huyer is a senior research associate in The Heritage Foundation’s Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies. Mike Gonzalez is Heritage’s Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum senior fellow.
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