Like a major air disaster that leaves blackened wreckage scattered far and wide, Zohran Mamdani’s New York collision with reality hurtles ahead. The mayor-elect has once again put on display a key reason that catastrophe is inevitable. It is worse than just overlooking something. It is an infantile psychological blind spot.
Mamdani epitomizes the socialist calculation problem all over again, the problem Mises identified more than a century ago. Socialism can’t calculate. So socialist politicians of all parties resist it like the plague. That is why leftist politicians are the first to jump on the rent control bandwagon. They are horrified by the information implicit in prices, real world signals that can actually encourage the provision of more housing. Like little children, they live in a fantasy land in which wishing makes things so. That explains their quick turn to price controls (with their accompanying shortages). If they can suppress prices by fiat, everyone can afford everything. Everyone, everything, everywhere, all at once.
Asked how he would get the $700 million needed to provide his promised free buses in New York, the mayor-elect answered, “The most important fact is that we fund it — not the question of how we do it, but that we do it.”
If wishes were buses, then New Yorkers would ride.
It’s not just Mamdani. It is a psychological blind spot endemic among the left. They are loathe to consider the costs and consequences of their policies, preferring to fly blind, oblivious to the coming crackup.
Barack Obama showed up on the Late Show with David Letterman as he campaigned for reelection in 2012. Expecting an easy answer from a candidate he appeared to favor, Letterman asked the president, “Just how big is the national debt?”
Obama appeared visibly out of sorts for just an instant as he admitted that he didn’t know “precisely.”
Trying to be helpful, Letterman asked, “Is it ten trillion?”
That’s when viewers learned that the President did not know “precisely” what the national debt was. Nor did he even know roughly.
Leftist hate calculation. Obama ducked the question.
Just for the record, the national debt was $10 trillion when Obama was elected the first time. At the time of his appearance on Letterman’s show, the debt had mushroomed to $16 trillion. It had grown by 60 percent in four short years.
President Obama would later announce an election year vote-buying goody for up to five million student loan borrowers. It was an executive decision to cap certain repayments.
The president didn’t know and couldn’t say how much his new initiative would cost.
“We actually don’t know the costs yet,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan answered for the administration. “We’ll figure that out on the back end.”
On the back end.
Leftist hate calculation. Because they prefer to shut their eyes tight, they shouldn’t be allowed to fly planes. Or drive buses.
