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Notes -
Let's talk socialism and the NYC mayoral race. Apparently the All-in podcast people think it's a sweeping wave that will drown out Progress with a capital P. London, Vienna, Chicago, and of course the California cities have already had socialist mayors for a while. Why not New York?
Honestly despite being a "conservative" I am broadly quite sympathetic to socialist arguments. I do think free markets actually kind of suck, inasmuch as we can even have free markets. Personally I think free markets don't really exist when you take into account that power abhors a vacuum, but they are a fiction with extremely high utility to create material goods.
Anyway, socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class. It's weary writing and thinking about politics when even the best laid plans seem to inevitably just get ground down by the dumbest things. I can completely understand why young folks want to just socialize everything.
Not that I agree with them, but hey, sometimes I wish I were still naive enough to think socialism or any -ism could fix the ills of our society. I sadly am not that optimistic.
That being said, I don't think society is unfixable. I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.
It's bizarre to me that you think the political class is inept, and you think the best response is to give them more power to screw things up in the economy.
Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly bloating the elder care apparatus, whereas socialism at the state + local level mostly means bribing connected nonprofits and unions to provide various crappy services that don't really work. Zohran's idea for city-run grocery stores is very dumb and will probably be dropped or completely overhauled after a few pilot programs demonstrate how silly it is.
Neither of these things have anything to do with the ownership of the means of production.
I feel like we've fallen into the trap of using "socialism" as a shorthand for "stupid liberal policy I hate" in the same way the "far right" now means "conservative people with ideas I really dislike"
He was a speaker at the DSA, which stands for "Democratic Socialists of America."
Clip here: https://x.com/Osint613/status/1939657700553486380 Actual Quotes:
Full long video at https://youtube.com/live/9K7HDuoJ0MQ
I'm not saying he isn't a socialist.
I'm saying "Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly , whereas socialism at the state + local level mostly means ."
Is not a very accurate way to describe socialism.
To add a similar thought, "bloating the elder care apparatus" is pretty much a bi-partisan issue in the West.
Going further, "bribing connected nonprofits and unions to provide various crappy services that don't really work" is very true for liberals, and so is the opposite "bribing connected companies to provide various crappy services that don't really work" for the conservative side.
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