ROSEN: Zohran Mamdani and the ‘democratic socialist’ grift

This column was first published at Complete Colorado.

Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old who won the Democrat primary (endorsed by fellow socialists Bernie Sanders and AOC) is now the party’s wholly unqualified candidate for mayor of New York City.  He’s a Muslim antisemite and Israel hater.  In college, he co-founded the school’s chapter of the pro-Hamas “Students for Justice in Palestine,” and graduated with a degree in Africana Studies. His thin resume includes a job as a foreclosure-prevention housing counselor, hip-hop musician, political campaign worker, and all of four years as a New York state assemblyman. With those meager credentials he presumes to govern the Big Apple.

The centerpiece of his campaign is to transform NYC – ironically, the financial capital of the world – to a model of “democratic socialism.”  Zohran is a charismatic preacher to a young, gullible progressive demographic.  (Aptly named, he’s a generation Z-er.)  I’ve forgotten more about economics than he knows – and I haven’t forgotten much.  The Z-man is a glib pretender, and a proud member of the anti-capitalist Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose membership features such economic geniuses as Congresswomen AOC, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.  Here’s an example of the ignorance of this ideology from DSA’s web page:

“We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few.”

“Make profits for a few?”  DSA is idiotic!  In a capitalist economy businesses can’t exist and employ workers without profits. “Workers” don’t start businesses, they join them and abandon those that are unprofitable.  Entrepreneurs provide creativity and their personal wealth to start a business. They, their stockholders, and lenders require a return on their investment derived from profits. “To meet human needs” and fund our ever-expanding welfare state,  federal, state, and city governments impose payroll taxes (that fund Social Security and Medicare for all), income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes on businesses. And tax their investors on interest income, dividends and capital gains.  Without profits those businesses disappear along with the products and services that satisfy multitudes of consumers.

Socialists claim capitalism is “unrestrained.”  That’s also absurd. In practice, our mixed-economy is a balance of limited government, capitalism, and individual freedom tempered with extensive regulations on businesses, redistribution of income, and a cornucopia of government welfare programs.  To the nation’s detriment, creeping socialism has upset this balance, poisoning the mixture, eroding freedom and propelling government spending beyond the nation’s tax capacity while driving up the national debt to the brink of fiscal insolvency.

Democratic socialism is a con game.  It’s final goal is communism. The father of socialism, Karl Marx, was an idealistic philosopher not an economist, whose vision was that capitalism would inevitably be overturned in a worldwide revolution of the proletariat (workers) and replaced with communism (“the dictatorship of the proletariat”), which, itself, would ultimately “wither away” as human nature would be perfected and government no longer needed in his imagined utopian, classless, harmonious society.

Instead, the world got the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (with the accent on “socialist”).  In reality, it was a totalitarian dictatorship and police state in which the Communist Party was the government, controlling everything from the economy to the culture, to religion, to the media. With no private enterprise, no property rights, no free press, no free speech, and no other political parties allowed.

North Korea and Cuba fit that model today.  Communist China was all of that before it became a hybrid of sorts, reviving its morbid economy by tolerating a slice of government-controlled capitalism – while that lasts. Today, it’s crushing freedom in Hong Kong and planning to take over the free and prosperous nation of Taiwan.

Zohran Mamdani has said he intends to “seize the means of production ” in NYC.  But democratic socialists of his ilk won’t stop there.  Like the Democrat party, they have no limiting principle when it comes to the expansion of government to run people’s lives.  As an economic system, democratic socialism is ultimately doomed to failure because it flies in the face of human nature.  Humans aren’t collectivist worker ants in a colony or bees in a hive.  They won’t involuntarily work as hard and creatively for the benefit of others as they will for themselves and their family.

When socialists demand “equity” they don’t mean equality of opportunity.  They mean equality of outcome regardless of effort, ambition and ability.  Socialism rewards failure, mediocrity, and laziness.  Consequently, it gets more of that.  By penalizing individual excellence, it gets much less of that.  That outcome is equality in poverty.

Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for CompleteColorado.com.