We spend so much time debating the horse-race aspects of politics—who will win? When will we know? How much of the public will rejoice?—that the basic political philosophy arguments about what should be done usually get lost in the shuffle. We mustn’t let the novelty value of Zohran Mamdani’s youthful, video-oriented, explicitly socialist, divided-field campaign for New York City mayor, or the lack of any great alternatives to his ascension, blind us to how awful an increase in socialist power would be for humanity.
The city that’s the de facto global capital-of-capitalism falling to such an ignorant and destructive political program would be a tragedy of historic proportions, one more unforced error in the long, slow defeat of our civilization.
Among the young in particular—but in New York City, among the ignorant or irrational of all ages—the assumption that government spending and planning yields outcomes that are an improvement over the normal, unfettered functioning of markets is rarely questioned, let alone debated. Neither IQ nor educational attainment is any guarantee that people have thought through how economics works or found the courage to question the implicit socialist assumptions spat out for about a century now by every news report, college lecture, and film.
Compounding the problem, the average conservative (if you can find one in New York City) is incapable of, or nowadays uninterested in, defending property rights and market activity against proposed government controls. The conservative would rather dodge by talking about and blaming immigrants or foreign foes, the right-populist by talking about how great President Trump purportedly is.
My fellow libertarians are often little better, spending as much time weighing in on the right or the left’s cultural attitudes as they do on educating the public about property rights, which ought to be the practical core of our philosophy. The Ayn Rand approach isn’t much help either, since her answer to “What about the poor?” is basically an off-putting “What do I care?” For every brilliant Objectivist philosopher able to articulate a better answer, you’ll find several young readers of Rand, some of them working on Wall Street, who prefer the stupid, heartless answer.
But property rights are neither a cruel legal imposition nor some arbitrary metaphysical assertion. They are a means of demarcating each individual’s control over her own body and her own material possessions, without which the mob would have the practical power to override every decision she made, even if the mob sang the praises of mental liberation and free-spiritedness as it did so.
Either you can decide how to move, trade, talk, contract, invest, touch, and build with other voluntary collaborators who each also control their own bodies and property, or else you are the pawn of some collective, whether that collective is nominally left-wing, right-wing, theocratic, or otherwise.
The basic reason socialism doesn’t work is its pretense that instead of having eight billion individual sets of preferences and personal plans to go with them (eight million in New York City alone), we have one “global agenda” or “national will” or “class interest.” Sometimes, we happen to want what numerous others do, but it’s rare, and it’d be dangerous to count on it being the case. It leads to catastrophic misallocations of resources, even entire unused cities in the case of China, despite all the P.R. touting that nation’s alleged collectivist successes.
If you were a college student and you honestly wanted people to enjoy music, for instance, you wouldn’t want your whole campus to vote for a single “unity” album purchase each month, would you? Better by far to let each individual make her own choices or you’re all liable to end up with a homogenous-sounding selection of elevator music, or at best Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits month after month. Let individuals do their own thing—not the Senate’s thing, not Trump’s thing (he may well have fond memories of Sinatra from his youth, which is fine as long as he doesn’t impose it on the unwilling), nor Zohran Mamdani’s thing, regardless of what he listens to.
In the divided field of the mayoral race—one of all too many areas in life in which we’re forced to make a collective decision instead of each going our own way in the marketplace—I realize there’s no ideal candidate, and it appears there is only one candidate with a chance of stopping the popular Mamdani. That is Andrew Cuomo (and even if all the other candidates drop out and support Cuomo, he only just barely beats Mamdani in current polls). Cuomo is by all accounts a thuggish sexist, and he’s certainly not a laissez-faire capitalist. In typical liberal New York politics fashion, he spouts so many denunciations of rent hikes, government spending cuts, and such that there would likely prove to be only a marginal practical difference between electing him and electing the avowed socialist Mamdani.
But every little bit of relief from the burden of socialist-style government helps—and don’t assume you know exactly what you’d get from Mamdani or that you’d get only the good stuff.
Mamdani will bring with him a cadre of socialist colleagues with unworkable ideas we haven’t even found time to worry about yet, and he’ll have an annual budget of some $100 billion to lavish on socialist projects both official and unofficial. If you’re counting on socialists to balance budgets and trim waste, you likely haven’t paid much attention to history. As deep in the hole as New York City is now, things could get worse, much worse. Mamdani, I’d bet, will keep on smiling and chuckling through it all, gleefully talking up sardine-packed free subways as get-to-know-your-neighbor adventures or assuring everyone we didn’t really need all those Wall Street-supported jobs after all, if they flee to Florida or Texas.
(I avoid speculating about exactly how Mamdani would affect policing, though we should probably all be very, very relieved that Trump’s Middle East peace deal decreases the odds of more Hamas supporters sparking violent clashes here on campuses or outside Jewish-owned businesses. And I doubt Mamdani’s free subways will be more civilized than they are now.)
With Cuomo, at least you probably get something resembling his past fairly moderate governing of New York State—not a cause for celebration but at least not a laughable negative economic example for the world for the next four years. I had thought there might be a devil-you-know rally around candidate Eric Adams simply due to his incumbent status, but that doesn’t appear to be happening, and as interesting as a Curtis Sliwa mayoralty would be, he’s only popular enough to split the anti-Mamdani vote right now, not win, with the Libertarian Party being even more marginal.
Sorry. It’s not the time for perfectionism. The polls are clear. They rank the candidates in almost exactly the reverse order I would’ve chosen. I don’t like it. Frankly, sometimes I don’t much like the people of New York City—especially not its vicious, arrogant, preening “intellectuals,” who think they could run the world without half trying and thus think their favorite politicians can surely do so. But I want to rescue the jerks from their own favorite candidate nonetheless, and even more so I want to rescue the innocents trapped in this city with them.
The numbers are plain. There’s only one option for thwarting Mamdani at this point, and that’s to send the harasser from Albany to Gracie Mansion, right in my own neighborhood. Beats communism. And plainly Mamdani is a communist, whatever technical label he uses. I’m sure he wouldn’t behave exactly like a worst-case-scenario communist, which is to say, Stalin or Pol Pot—probably more like a clueless editor from the Brooklyn leftist magazine Jacobin, suddenly thrust into a position with much weightier responsibilities.
But it’s worth wondering what sort of practical decisions one can reasonably expect from people who still treat communism or socialism as “ideals” after the disasters these economic philosophies (inevitably) wrought last century: 100 million dead under communism proper, 300 million dead if you shy away from communism and prefer to tally the results of big government in general last century—a literal “decimation,” about a 10th of the Earth’s population at the time, an impact that would make the supervillain Thanos proud. Yet socialism in one form or another is still praised by college students and psychotics across the land, a disproportionate number of them right here in this smug city.
If you don’t think the relatively unambitious Mamdani deserves comparison to Stalin or Thanos, though, at least think back far enough, for comparison’s sake, to how unhappy people were with the mayoralty of stealth-communist Bill De Blasio, the guy who honeymooned in Cuba and went on to complain that alas he can’t take away building owners’ apartments because New York law is too property-oriented. Do you expect Mamdani to show any greater deference to law or economic reality than De Blasio did?
Mamdani thinks he can explain away the laws of economics with a bit of prop-comic-level children’s theatre and some glib assurances that he’ll make everything fair and dignified, prices and complex resource coordination be damned. Imagine the intensity of narcissistic psychosis needed for him to think he can run this town. Arguably, anyone of any party who thinks he can run it all is insane, but at least pro-market politicians understand that most of it runs itself through innumerable subtle price signals and voluntary transactions. The less the government tries to wade in and dominate, the better.
I can understand the frustration with material conditions or with other lame politicians that tempts people to vote for Mamdani, but it wouldn’t really be a vote against harassment or poverty or Trump. It would be a vote against New York City. Please don’t do this to us, New York.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey