Democratic socialist and softcore communist Zohran Mamdani has won the New York City mayoral election with a plurality of the vote, carried on the backs of young people fed up with the high cost of living. But even though rent there is ungodly as is, things can always get worse. Here, I’ll run through some of Zohran’s proposals and explain what damage they are about to do. But other Roundup writers have covered that extensively. So there is now a new question to answer: where is this country headed? What will become of the Democratic Party? This and more coming up.

Big Government in the Big Apple

Mamdani calls for a number of things to happen in New York. I’ll cover two flagship proposals, lay out their flaws, and explain whether Mamdani could actually implement them. This is only part of the article. If you want a deep dive article dedicated entirely to the policy side, I recommend you go read Noah Cowley’s article here.

Government Groceries

Do you like going to the DMV? What if that could be how every grocery run was? Do I have the policy proposal for you.

Zohran Mamdani has promised to open a series of government-run grocery stores to lower food prices for the masses. He claims that, since private-sector stores need to make a profit, they artificially inflate food prices. He claims that, because government-owned stores need not operate with any profit margin, they can offer lower prices to the people of New York.

Anyone with a working knowledge of history can tell how stupid this idea is. No expertise in economics is needed, just good old pattern recognition. Did Soviet grocery stores, run by the state, succeed in bringing lower food prices? Did the CLAP delivery service in Venezuela do that? No. They brought empty shelves instead. Why? Because the store has no incentive to make itself efficient if it just runs at a constant loss. If the government just prices everything below market and dumps money into the store when it inevitably begins to fail, why should they bother mopping the floor? Why should they bother stocking the shelves?

Private grocery stores are kept in shape by the need for profit. The rats are kept away because people don’t like shopping at a place with rats. A government-run grocery store, even while competing with private stores (unlike the Soviet system of crushing all private enterprise) defeats all that. Yes, they still need to remain competitive to stay in business. But nobody’s livelihood is on the line if they don’t bother. There is no small business owner’s family to feed. If the government store you’re in charge of goes under, the New York City Government under Mamdani probably won’t even try to fire you. And if they do, don’t worry! That public sector union you’re a part of is here to save the day and prevent your firing. There’s no reason to run your government grocery store well under Mamdani’s system.

Could he try this? Yes. Multiple city governments have, and subsequently failed. Kansas City was the most recent to admit defeat, closing Sun Fresh Market amid empty shelves and an unsafe environment. Mamdani, if he successfully forces the New York City Council into submission, does have the power to try this.

Commie Blocks Abound

Have you ever wished the capital of the free world looked like eastern Europe? The endless slabs of “communist grey” concrete make for such an inviting home. But if you don’t wish that, you’ll be upset to hear of Mamdani’s plan for New York. Centered on rent freezes and public housing, it’s the stuff of land developers’ nightmares.

There are two prongs to this war on the housing crisis:

1. An immediate freeze to rent on all New York City rent-stabilized apartments

Rent control is an idea that’s been tried before all over the world. What’s not to love? The government tells landlords they can’t raise rent above a certain percentage each year, and then all of your rent problems are magically solved! But when those landlords realize they lose money renting out units because the government stepped in and set prices, they stop putting units up for rent altogether. Housing prices then skyrocket, and you end up with San Francisco.

This is a tale as old as socialist city government. San Francisco tried this, and is still dealing with the fallout. Mayor Daniel Lurie is on the right track with his deregulation of the construction industry, but he is still in a deep hole after his predecessors’ rent control idiocy. New York even tried this before, in the 1970s. The result? New York in the 1970s. Anybody who was there can tell you it wasn’t pretty. Shoddy maintenance and sky-high vacancy rates caused the abandonment of thousands of units per year by the late 70s. Argentina tried rent control, and it made things so bad they elected the first libertarian world leader in history to fix them. Venezuela still does have stringent rent control, and their housing crisis is as bad as ever.

Rent control helps existing tenants, sure. But anybody who isn’t lucky enough to be handed a rent-stabilized apartment gets screwed over big time. The aforementioned problem of landlords withdrawing their properties from the market is not a surmountable problem that got in the way of previous attempts. It is the unavoidable, inevitable consequence of rent control.

2. A $100 billion program to build 200,000 new public housing units

Public housing is also one of those things people constantly talk about, but never seem to know the history of. The United States has tried public housing before. The aforementioned drive in the 1970s for rent control came hand-in-hand with public housing projects. The result? Crime-ridden, poorly-maintained slums. “The projects”, as they came to be known, are synonymous with disastrous city government.

They failed for many reasons. For one, they concentrate all the city’s poorest residents into a few big apartment buildings, meaning economic opportunities were nonexistent. They also concentrated all the problem-causers in one awful place. Robert Taylor Homes, probably the most famous failure in public housing history, became a genuine no-go zone for Chicago police officers, who began refusing to patrol the dimly-lit hallways of the complex, lest they be ambushed by the numerous drug-pedaling gangs in the development. CPD eventually feared even the general area after coming under fire from the top floors as they patrolled the street. The Chicago Housing Authority had successfully turned south Chicago into an urban combat zone.

Why is all of this? Oftentimes it’s underfunding, which makes the socialists say “then why don’t we just fund the projects properly?”. But the problem with that line of thinking is that government mismanagement is, at least in the U.S., a universal. Why is it that public housing in the U.S. never works, no matter what city tries it? It’s because money is limited, crime does exist, and politicians are terrible at their jobs. So when the city faces budget shortfalls from apartment complexes unable to fund themselves with residents’ rent, city hall will choose to just slash funding instead of cracking down on crime and giving residents genuine economic opportunities. The actual solution to the housing crisis is for the government to butt out and let construction companies do their jobs, with occasional mixed-housing for the very most desperate. Mamdani is heading the exact opposite way.

What Now?

The natural question after this resounding socialist victory is, well, natural: do the commie victories keep coming? Is a wave of socialism about to reshape the Democratic Party? Is that same wave about to sweep Congress and the White House?

The answers to those questions depend on how the next three years go.

I think it’s pretty likely that the DNC is now impotent to stop the Democratic Socialists of America. The DSA has garnered so much momentum in the last year alone that the crumbling dikes of the DNC establishment are about to meet a Katrina-style catastrophe. Perhaps Gavin Newsom emerges as the leader of a more moderate faction (an utterly insane sentence on its face, but the sad reality nonetheless). But the tide of socialism is strong, and the momentum is with AOC for now. That could change, but it seems that the Democrats are quickly becoming the party of a more cancerous, more blatant, and more radical version of Marxism than they ever have been.

If the economy does okay, then most Americans will see the democratic socialists for what they are, and keep them well away from the White House and Congress. The good news is that, fundamentally, the socialists do not have broad appeal. No moderate wants the Union of Soviet Socialist American Republics to be a thing.

But people do stupid things when they get desperate. They vote for radicals when their paychecks fail to cover the bills. If a nasty recession were to happen in the next three and a half years, who knows who they’d vote for? Political radicalization is already beginning to take root in this country, largely because of economic woes. If a 2007-style last-minute recession hits in 2027, that could cause some very dumb votes to be cast out of desperation.

So the answer is, as per usual, an unsatisfying “maybe”. But make no mistake, the chances just went up massively. If you want a number for the presidency, based on nothing but my finest eyeballing, it just went from like 10% to 30%. As for Congress, a wave of socialism is inevitable. I just don’t know how big that wave will be. It may well only be a small minority of democrats. But, as always, we’ll see how this turns out.

Thanks for tuning into The Roundup. Be sure to check out our other articles for news, sports, and viewpoint content!