The recent Democrat primary in New York City saw former NY State Governor Andrew Cuomo concede the victory to the 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani. Flashing a perfect smile, Mamdani accepted his victory with joy knowing that this victory put him in a good position to become mayor of New York.
Mamdani is a ludicrously inexperienced candidate who tends to speak aggressively and insistently, which is the tone of an immature know-it-all. His personal work experience is extremely limited and there are no notable accomplishments marking his life since he graduated from Bowdoin College.
As a true Marxist, his campaign derives its impetus from the communist slogan of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Since life is sustained at a basic level by the air we breathe and the food we eat, he has promised to have government run grocery stores where food prices will be kept down because the stores will not pay property tax or rent. As someone who had many students from the former Soviet Union after it collapsed in 1991, I heard many stories about obtaining food in the USSR under communism where all the grocery stores and butcher shops were government-owned.
Students regaled me with stories of how family members would have to line up for hours at butcher shops to obtain even one chicken. Furthermore, to even be certain that a decent chicken awaited the customer after a long wait, bribes had to be paid ahead of time to those running the shops. The range of items for sale was quite limited. There was a pathetic lack of choice in the former USSR, a country big on promises but weak on delivery.
Frequently, my wife and I receive ads at our door in NYC from local supermarkets with six to eight pages of items for sale. The variety and the sales opportunities for price savings are great.
Food prices are not fixed, competition for customers is lively and real, choices for consumers are extensive, and stores must be well-managed in order to survive in the marketplace.
In the USSR, clothing was drab with limited colors and styles. A friend who was one of the leading architects of shopping malls on the East Coast visited the USSR in the mid-eighties and was wearing Levi’s. As he walked through Moscow one day, someone beckoned to him from an alley and asked if he could buy the Levi’s (they were unavailable in the government-run clothing stores). My friend went back to his hotel, changed trousers, and returned to sell the man his Levi’s.
Our profit-driven economic system is conducive to variety — real freedom of choice. This commie projection that government-owned and -run manufacturing and retail institutions means getting the same things for less money is a false premise intended to entrap a gullible population.
Even the communist Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping realized in the 1980s that government ownership could not meet the needs of people. He began opening “empowerment zones” where non-Chinese corporations could come in, use Chinese labor, and then export to other countries or sell in Chinese markets and make profits. However, there was an additional level of costs in this process, namely the bribes to communist party functionaries in the People’s Republic of China.
Our President Bill Clinton at the end of his presidency opened the door for the Chinese to market these empowerment zone goods in the USA. That is why so many American businesses moved off-shore and many American jobs were lost to the PRC.
Government-owned grocery stores are also terrible in that they mislead the public into thinking that when prices are too high it is because of the profits being sought by the stores, whereas inflation is generated by a variety of economic policies and trends.
Mamdani, who lacks experience and economic understanding, is also issuing an economic policy siren song by calling for free fares and faster buses for the city. Where is the money for this supposed to come from? Will thousands of transit workers have to live indefinitely without raises? Who will be paying for the maintenance of the buses? Fuel for the buses? Depots where the buses are parked and maintained when not in use? Tools for repairing buses? Supervision of the buses to see that their schedules are maintained or revised when needed?
At present 1% of NYC pays 40% of the taxes of the city. Will city or state taxes on food or other consumer items have to rise to support such a huge change as free buses? Mamdani does not say a word in answer to these questions. Where will the money come from for these changes?
No increase in rents for rent stabilized houses is another Mamdani campaign goal. What a delightful vision! Rent-stabilized apartments in New York is a category of apartment living where many apartment rents are controlled by a board which determines how much rents can be raised on tenants for one or two upcoming years of their tenancy. The landlords cannot independently raise rents as they see fit in NYC. This was instituted to provide a compromise between providing fair increases in rent in light of increases in costs while preventing wholesale evictions resulting from excessive increases. Mamdani is appealing to thousands upon thousands of residents by telling them their rents will not go up.
But how will this affect the provision of heat in the winter? Repairs to apartments or the buildings themselves? Inflation is not only driven by high oil prices, which prices may come down as we “drill baby drill,” but are also a function of the ever-increasing national debt which New York has little or no control over.
A new apartment building in New York City has just been finished three blocks from where I live, and the rent for a one-bedroom apartment starts at $3,500! This is not on the Upper East Side of Manhattan — which is the toniest neighborhood in New York — but in one of the other four boroughs of NYC. There is a housing shortage in New York City, and part of the reason for that is that landlords or potential landlords feel unduly constrained by the government.
Dear reader, there is no free lunch. The commie Mamdani is doing what commies always do — they promise an extravagant free lunch, but when the lunch arrives (if at all) it is just a raw carrot and a boiled chicken leg.
E. Jeffrey Ludwig is a Harvard Master Teacher who has taught history, philosophy, and writing at Harvard, Penn State, Boston State College, Lesley University, and was included in Who’s Who Among America’s High School Teachers.
Image: Bingjiefu He, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.
