Liberals and progressives are celebrating Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s primary victory as proof that New York City is ready for a “democratic socialist” revolution.
They’re badly in need of a history lesson: Every socialist revolution has failed and set back the goals it meant to accomplish.
Everywhere it has been tried, socialism has meant economic decay at best and mass death at worst.
The global death toll from socialism and communism is roughly 100 million souls.
Whether the victims died in Stalinist gulags, Mao’s Great Leap famine or Pol Pot’s “killing fields,” the underlying logic was the same: When the state owns everything, the individual owns nothing — not even his life.
Mamdani’s own platform may seem more anodyne, but it is a distilled sampler of socialism’s greatest failures: nationalized businesses (public utilities), price controls (rent freezes, “affordable” everything) and government-run retail.
Meanwhile, capitalism’s ledger shows no mass graves — only the lifted living standards of billions.
Even China’s rise from Mao-made famine to middle-class affluence began the day Deng Xiaoping opened markets and let peasants keep what they grew.
Mamdani promises city-run groceries to “bring down prices,” as if 8 million New Yorkers will flock to a public-owned store without remembering Venezuela’s empty-shelf socialism.
He proposes a rent freeze, forcing down the price of housing. Berlin’s leftist government tried the same stunt with its 2020 Mietendeckel: Apartment listings collapsed 41.5% in a single year.
He proposes fare-free buses. Tallinn, Estonia, made transit free in 2013; a Royal Institute of Technology audit found ridership rose barely 3% and car traffic scarcely fell, even as taxpayers picked up the heavy bill.
He proposes no-cost child care. Quebec’s celebrated “$5-a-day” day care ballooned in cost and delivered a “sizeable negative shock to non-cognitive skills” that lingered into adolescence, per the National Bureau of Economic Research — along with higher crime and lower life satisfaction.
All this is funded, naturally, by punishing “the rich” — until they decamp to Florida, just as over a million wealth-holders fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba, 6 million Venezuelans (most college educated) abandoned Nicolás Maduro’s “Bolivarian miracle” and 15% of Russia’s millionaires bolted in a single year once Vladimir Putin’s neo-Soviet expansion started.
The socialist mayoral hopeful’s web site also touts “public ownership of utilities,” a polite phrase for state takeover of the power grid.
Another of Mamdani’s proposals is boosting the city’s minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030 — an 82% jump.
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That would saddle small employers with entry-level labor costs near $65,000 a year, forcing many to lay off staff, automate or close — and leave fewer rungs on the ladder for new workers.
Then there’s policing. This may be the part of Mamdani’s platform that is most acutely not what it seems.
In 2020, Mamdani embraced “defund the police” during the city’s summer of riots. Now he says he merely wants to shift funds to a new Department of Community Safety.
Here’s the irony socialists rarely acknowledge: Every successful socialist leader, from Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Maduro Venezuela to Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum’s Mexico, has depended on a stronger, more intrusive police force to enforce rationing, suppress dissent and make those neat five-year plans look “orderly.”
Finally, his “Trump-proofing” proposal — getting ICE out of NYC and ending any cooperation with the feds — sounds like an open invitation for gangs like the Tren de Aragua and MS-13.
Do New York City socialists expect everyone to hold hands and sing Kumbaya?
Mamdani’s agenda is doomed to fail because it doesn’t understand that NYC’s problem is not capitalism but its own government.
High costs in New York stem from layers of policy that strangle them: restrictive zoning locks 75% of residential land into one- and two-family lots, prevailing-wage and union rules push subway construction to an eye-watering $2 billion to $3 billion per mile, and the New York City Housing Authority’s $80 billion repair backlog shows what happens when government runs housing.
Add the nation’s heaviest big-city tax burden and miles of red tape, and you’ve got an economy in which prices climb and paychecks stall.
Why are Democrats doing this to themselves? Part of the answer is Donald Trump.
An unconventional Republican back in the White House has driven many liberals to think the best response is a hard-left hook.
But backing Mamdani’s agenda clashes with that of the majority of Democratic voters who value prosperity over class warfare — among them the millions of Latinos who’ve escaped socialism, support Democrats and now face a party willing to impose on them the very ideas that prompted them to flee.
Santiago Vidal Calvo is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute. The views are his own and not those of the Manhattan Institute.
