Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City is a triumph of moral barbarism, economic illiteracy, illogic, and just plain envy. Mamdani’s campaign had a double pitch: billionaires should not exist, and “the people” deserve free stuff.
At first I thought his supporters did not understand the old free-market meme, TANSTAAFL: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Nature provides only raw materials, which are useless in their original state. Ingenuity turns them into resources. But then I realized that while Mamdani used the word free, he also said he would get the money for the free stuff by further taxing the rich. The people who voted for him heard that, so they couldn’t have thought that bus rides, daycare, and whatever else he has plans for would really be free—just free to them.
The demand that other people should pay—whether they want to or not, under threat of imprisonment—for what you want is monstrous on many levels. The economic harm from the variants of this demand has been documented theoretically and empirically many times over many years. You can look it up. Begin with Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. Then read up on the Soviet Union, pre-1979 China, pre-1991 India, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, or Venezuela.
Like the laws of physics, the laws of human action (economics) cannot be repealed; if they are ignored, the consequences are catastrophic, especially for the most vulnerable, who are the ostensibly intended beneficiaries of giveaways. When bus rides are free, how long will it be before civilized people find them unusable? When rents are frozen, which Mamdani’s supporters robotically demand, how long before apartments deteriorate even further or are taken off the market?
When the state forces other people to pay for what you want, that’s slavery. Mamdani and his ilk insist on the right to medical care, housing, education, “affordable” groceries, etc. But how can such rights exist? Each of those services must be provided by individuals. Don’t they have the right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness? If A has a right to B’s labor or the fruits thereof, then B must be A’s slave. I thought good people were against slavery. Did I miss the memo?
Ayn Rand taught us that people’s extraordinary achievements and resulting financial success do not justify declaring open season on them. They have the same rights as those who achieve less or nothing at all. Treating them as sacrificial animals is unjust (and self-defeating). Great producers of wealth have no duty to serve those who produce little or nothing, just as no one has a duty to serve the great producers. Each life is an end in itself requiring no justification. Respecting all people’s rights, that is, living by reason not force, is constitutive of the self-interested life. (Selfishness, as most people use that word, is actually myopia, that is, under-concern, not over-concern, with self.) The code of self-sacrifice, as Rand pointed out, is incoherent because if applied universally, no one would be entitled to receive the booty. In practice, when someone preaches self-sacrifice, she said, someone is planning on collecting the sacrifices..
The oppressive bigotry against the “rich” is unseemly because it is a resentment of achievement in itself. The exploitation claim is long-demolished nonsense. (Making a fortune off the taxpayers is another kettle of fish.) Moreover, it ought to be obvious that punishing people for their success will discourage the thought and effort that make success possible. Incentives matter. Considering that innovators earn only a small fraction of the value that they make possible for others, how does punishing success help the people Mamdani says he cares about? Thanks to innovators—in the technological and management senses—the “poorest” Americans are actually among the richest people who ever walked the earth. Extreme poverty has been plummeting for decades. The rest of the world has been catching up with the bourgeois West thanks to technology, increasing liberty, and global trade. What has Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America done to benefit anyone?
A final word about that qualifier democratic in “democratic socialism.” It is meant to dupe the naive; that is, it is intended to dissociate socialism from the Marx-inspired tyrannies that produced a hundred million corpses beginning in 1917. Communist East Germany was officially the German Democratic Republic, just as communist North Korea is the Democratic Republic of Korea.
That this PR trick fools anyone anymore is hard to believe. Even if elections were held under socialism, how would that change it into something benign? Democratic or not, socialism is government planning of people’s lives, in contrast to capitalism—the competitive market economy in which people make their own plans and peacefully coordinate with others through the price system and mutually beneficial free exchange. Periodically casting one vote among many for those who will formulate and carry out the plan would not fix what’s wrong with socialism. Even under majority rule, the minority must obey or starve, as the nice Bolshevik Trotsky so charmingly put it. Any individual is a potential threat to the plan and therefore must not be tolerated. Central planning and social cooperation through individual freedom cannot coexist.
Either Mamdani does not know this or he won’t acknowledge it. That destroys his claim to care about people. For him, the people are mere stage props (as are the Palestinians). His ideology would oppress them. Despite the democratic sales pitch, this child of the elite aspires to implement the most elitist of oppressive systems. Fanatic or grifter? You decide.
