Happily Never After for NYC

The race for mayor in The Big Apple is bigger than a contest over potholes or zoning maps. It’s become a choice between the American fabric of limited government and free enterprise — and a shamelessly socialist pet project championed by Democrat nominee Zohran Mamdani.

With current Mayor Eric Adams out and the field reshuffled, the campaign has snapped into heightened relief: Mamdani and former Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo are now volleying direct shots, and the question for voters is whether City Hall should regulate private markets — or run them. Recent coverage captured the inflection point: after Adams’ exit, Mamdani and Cuomo escalated attacks on each other, stewing up November as a clash of worldviews as much as personalities.

Let’s be brutally clear about the stakes. Mamdani is unapologetic about his politics — he’s a democratic socialist — and his platform screams it: city-operated grocery stores, “fast, fare-free buses,” a rent freeze and large-scale “social housing,” plus a posture that casts “corporate exploitation” as the main driver of city costs. Those are not gradual tweaks. They’re a theory of the city that swaps government ownership for competitive markets when politicians deem those markets to be lagging.

Americans have heard of this before, but only in history books, and history is not ambiguous. When the state takes over private industry or rules it by decree, costs are often hidden, quality is abandoned, scarcity grows, and politics — rather than performance — determines who gets what.

Consider Venezuela. For years, its government grew control over the national oil company and intervened in a widespread economic takeover through price controls and monetary financing. The result: a supply chain nightmare, painful inflation, and shortages — an economic and humanitarian crisis that was compounded by external sanctions. Policy, when abused with unrealistic moonshot priorities, cause social unrest and market collapse.

Cuba’s framework is an earlier template. In 1960, the Castro government adopted Law 851, authorizing sweeping nationalizations of U.S.-owned utilities, refineries, and other enterprises. The law structured compensation through long-dated bonds — on paper a nod to property rights, in practice an assertion that the state could unilaterally redefine them. Subsequent legal analyses document the scale of the expropriations and the decades of economic underperformance that followed under centralized control. Property was seized in the name of equality; scarcity became the norm.

And if those feel too distant, look at Zimbabwe’s “fast-track” land seizures two decades ago. Overnight expropriation destroyed property rights, credit formation, and agricultural output. GDP per capita cratered into the late 2000s; only now is the government tentatively compensating some dispossessed farmers as a condition of re-entering normal finance. That is what happens when governments treat private assets as political spoils.

Why implement a repeated, failed socialist fairytale into a New York mayoral race? Because the logic — brought to you by today’s fashionable socialism — is the same: when prices are high or services underperform, let government own the storefront, set the wage, or fix the price. But this is not a wand to wave. It’s a simple dollar-diversion from the receipt to the tax bill, dampening the competitive pressure that truly lowers prices and improves quality of service.

New Yorkers aren’t blind to pain. Groceries are expensive. Commutes are slow. Rents bite. But we should be honest about causes and cures. If you want lower food prices, you don’t need a city-run commissary; you need more competitors in underserved neighborhoods, faster permitting for gentrification, safer streets for businesses and families, and less red tape barricading new entrants. If you want better public transportation, don’t kneecap pricing and operations with political pontification; fix headways, enforce bus-lane priority, crack down on fare evasion, and invest where demand is real. If you want more housing, legalize more of it near transit and job centers — then get out of the way so builders can build.

That’s the American way: a government that sets rules and provides public goods, while free people build, hire, invest, and innovate within those rules. It’s the same balance that turned a port city into the capital of American arts, finance, media, and tech. Replace it with a City Hall grocery chain and an ever-expanding “Department of Community Safety,” and we’ll get what politics is good at producing: slogans, rations, and a system where insiders cut the line.

None of this is an attack on the desire for fairness. It’s a defense of what works. When New York has grown, it’s because we married order and opportunity: policing that keeps people safe; predictable rules for landlords and tenants; zoning that allows growth instead of criminalizing it; and social insurance that catches people who fall without turning everyone else into a ward of the state.

Elections clarify. This one asks: do we stick with American principles — limited powers, dispersed authority, markets tempered by law — or do we hop on the latest ideological bandwagon that promises abundance through public ownership? Voters have a right to be skeptical. The international record is not an abstraction; it’s a ledger of consequences.

Supporters of the socialist wave will say, “Those were different countries; New York isn’t Venezuela or Cuba.” True. And no one suggests it is. But economic mechanisms don’t stop at customs. When you dull supply and demand economics, politicize investment, or crowd out private ventures, you get less of the innovation and accountability that make complex systems — like a city’s food supply, transit network, and housing market — work at scale.

New York is a city of merchants and makers, not moochers and mandates. We can fight for affordability without turning City Hall into a supermarket operator. We can expand opportunity without deciding prices from the rostrum. We can insist on certain rights for workers and safety for neighborhoods without handing the keys of the economy to bureaucrats.

Between Mamdani’s municipal socialism and the American habit of self-government, I’ll take the latter — imperfect, argumentative, and gloriously productive. It built this city once. Given the chance, it will do so again.