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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.
Nit: when did our definition of socialism become so drowned-down? Is anything that's not free (free-as-in-captured) market capitalism now considered socialism? The only "means of production" that Mamdani is suggesting be owned publicly are a few grocery stores, no? That's hardly a "seizure" of means.
Is FoxNews blocking the term DemSoc from taking off in the US?
You can read the guy's program yourself
https://www.zohranfornyc.com/
rent freeze, state built housing, free public transport, state owned grocery stores, free childcare, - all of this paid by wishful thinking and unicorn dust. Close enough to socialism. His tax plan is for 10 billion from my understanding for his whole term mostly by the rich.
I really wish he will win. And I really wish he succeeds in implementing his program, just so that USA will see first hand the results of those policies.
I guess this is the issue lol. Point-by-point, why none of this is particularly radical in most societies that people don't consider "socialist":
Rent freezes are controversial cart-before-the-horse band-aid solution to a problem that may or may not be caused NIMBYism. The proposed rent freeze is for rent-stabilized tenants, a specific class of asset. So hopefully you weren't trying to paint this as a city-wide rent freeze, which would never pass anyway. But also not specifically socialist, at all. Very much no means of production being seized.
Hardly uniquely socialist. They used to be called "projects". Also controversial because it tends to have extremely high per-unit costs vs. market rent ROI, but that may or may not be attributable to not being able to just build housing, and more to needing to be state-of-the-art energy efficient, fully ADA compliant, up-to-code, etc. etc.
Better than "company towns" imo.
Another exaggeration. The free part is for buses only. As someone who's taken a lot of public transit in many different cities, buses are frequently used by more blue collar / "barista" type workers, whereas light rail is more often used by professionals. It's a pragmatically progressive (in the sense of: tax those who can afford it) solution to the problem of rising fare prices, imo.
Also: no one bats an eye about free public roads. Damage to roads is quadratic to the weight of the load: we all subsidize the trailer truck shipping industry with our gas prices and taxes that build our roads. This lowers prices at every checkout, at the cost of an anemic rail system.
Obviously an experimental / pilot project. Curious to see if there's a nice food distribution middle ground between "soup kitchen" and "Whole Foods" that a city government can occupy. An ideal implementation of this looks more like a 7-days-a-week farmer's market to me than a crumbling Aldi with yellowed fluorescent lights and grimey 90s tiles.
Are grade school, middle school, and high school not "free childcare"?
The most ambitious and least achievable point in his agenda. To someone completely removed from the situation, I think expanding pre-K and early childhood programs is the more pragmatic way to go about effecting change - but that doesn't pop on a web page meant to excite people about an election campaign.
Along with everything else the government has spent money on. At least these things are attempting to have a positive impact on working class families as opposed to ammunition for a genocide on the other side of the world.
You're right, it's not all NYC apartments, just half of them.
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