(Daily Signal)—That people get the government they deserve is a cruel adage, too cruel if you live in dark places where a small minority with guns terrorizes an unarmed population—see “Cuba, socialist state of.” But in a democracy, the maxim holds firmly.
Which means that if the citizens of New York City vote in Zohran Mamdani as their mayor come November, and things go badly, then Gotham really can’t ask for our sympathy. That Democrats voted him as their candidate in the primary on June 24 is one thing, but if voters of all parties ratify that decision on Election Day, that’s another.
Then it’s Pottery Barn rules: If you break it, you own it. Sure, it’s only natural to spare an initial thought for our compatriots from the Bronx to Staten Island if things go south, but after that, sit back and get the popcorn. I plan to do so wearing my threadbare Yankee cap.
Let’s see what communism does to a major, modern metropolis—the world’s financial center, no less.
If it’s really as good as its wild-eyed evangelizers say—and they are wild-eyed, if you’ve ever seen one up close—then people from the rest of the Empire State and the other 49 states will be flocking into the city.
The history of communism, everywhere else it has been tried, says the contrary. People will do anything within their power to escape its clutches. Communist states have had to throw up barbed wire fences, and in the case of Berlin, a wall, to keep desperate citizens from fleeing.
God in His infinite wisdom has even given us two examples of places with the same culture, DNA, and history, where half practiced capitalism and freedom, and the other communism: Korea and Germany.
In both those places, the free half thrived, and the communist half floundered.
Why do capitalism and freedom go together? Because capitalism is freedom. It means that you own the product of the sweat of your brow or that of your ancestors, right to property, and are free to sell it to whomever you please if the price is right. That’s it.
The word is ugly because it was critics of this system, Karl Marx among them, who coined it. Adam Smith never used it, for example. According to the Liberty Fund, “The origin of the term le capitalisme can be traced back to the late 1840s when socialists such as Pierre Leroux (1848), Louis Blanc (1849), and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1851) began using it in a detrimental way to describe the free-market system as part of their campaign to introduce socialist reforms.”
But we’re stuck with it now, and as Shakespeare said of a rose, something smells sweet or stinks no matter the nomenclature.
Which brings us back to our man Mamdani. Asked by CNN’s Erin Burnett late last month, “Do you like capitalism?” Mamdani, 33, answered, “No, I have many critiques of capitalism.”
Mamdani means it. He wants a network of city-owned grocery stores to bring prices down, he says.
What Mamdani misses is that it’s the capitalist competition of privately owned grocery stores and bodegas that keeps prices low. Capitalists must turn a profit and thus can only price-gouge elite circles, to which Mamdani belongs, with items deemed to be luxury.
To sell to the middle class, stores must compete with lower prices and better products.
“Mamdani blames grocery stores for running up food costs when in reality, grocery stores are some of the lowest-margin businesses around, with 1-2% profit margins in good times,” wrote Yale’s Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld and the Leadership Institute’s Steven Tian and Stephen Henriques in Time.
And Mamdani doesn’t stop there. He spouts Marxist rhetoric right and left—or left and far left. He is for “seizing the means of production,” and believes in the maxim “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.” In 2020, he tweeted that a communist mayor in an Indian town would make an ideal New York mayor.
Reasonably, President Donald Trump referred to Mamdani as a “100% Communist Lunatic.” PolitiFact ridiculously tut-tutted. “Experts in political parties and movements said Mamdani’s passing remark is associated with communism, but it’s hard to say much more about Mamdani’s views,” it said.
Who on Earth are these “experts”? In the “Communist Manifesto” of 1848, Marx wrote that the workers would need to “centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State,” while he wrote about the needs-abilities equation in the “Critique of the Gotha Programme” of 1875.
Appearing on “Meet the Press” on June 29, Mamdani was asked if he was a communist, and he answered with his patented smile, “No, I’m not.” Unfortunately for him, there is a record of Fidel Castro also appearing on the same show in 1959 and also insisting, “I am not a communist.”
I’ve seen this movie before, and it is a horror show. As a 12-year-old boy, I made it to Europe with my mother and sister, after having spent my young life in Communist Cuba, where all the stores were state-owned.
The thing that struck me first was that I finally realized why stores had shelves—to carry goods. Shelves were stocked with cans, sacks of flour, sugar, pickle jars, rice, etc. I had never seen that, ever, in Castro’s Caribbean paradise.
Good luck, Big Apple. As long as Mamdani doesn’t expropriate the Yankees …
Originally published by the Washington Examiner
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