I & I Editorial BoardThere are 123 billionaires living in New York City. Zohran Mamdani, the socially and economically advantaged socialist boy who’s apparently never held a real job and is busy stoking class warfare as he campaigns to be the city’s next mayor, says they shouldn’t exist. Voters need to know that their city can get along just fine without Mamdani. But it would fall into a raging hellhole without billionaires.
“I don’t think that we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality, and ultimately, what we need more of is equality across our city and across our state and across our country,” Mamdani said last month on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The views of an imbecile, or of a performative politician feeding his ego and trying to make up for a life of mostly idleness, apparently appeal to Gotham voters. Mamdani easily won the Democratic primary and is, for now, the favorite to win the general election in the fall.
For those who aren’t familiar with Mamdani, or need a refresher, he is a Democratic Socialist with Marxist urges that he doesn’t try to hide. As we noted last week:
Like Karl Marx, the privileged Mamdani, who calls himself a ‘BMW Bolshevik,’ sees the world through the lens of class struggle. The platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which he is a member, ‘fights’ for ‘the abolition of capitalism‘ as well as the ‘social ownership of all major industry and infrastructure,’ two Marxist principles that Mamdani supports.
Mamdani is also promising ‘free stuff’ for New Yorkers, from bus trips to child care; proposes to freeze rents (to stick it to those greedy capitalist landlords, no doubt); wishes to ‘shift the tax burden … to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods.’
The spoiled, callow, nepo baby momma’s boy has also tweeted the Marxist rallying cry: “Each according to their need, each according to their ability.”
And there’s that loony idea of government-run grocery stores.
Mamdani will be the bringer of misery if he’s elected mayor. That’s always the outcome when Marxism and its somewhat lighter version called socialism are set loose on people. The promised utopias turn out to be wretched and grim places, from Cuba to the Soviet Union to Mao’s China to North Korea, with a lot of Nicaragua and Venezuela mixed in. Socialism destroys.
“Mamdani presents a real economic threat to residents of the five boroughs and their upstate neighbors – and even to the economic well-being of the entire country,” writes Bennett Nuss, an associate with the National Center for Public Policy Research, in the Wall Street Journal.
New York Post columnist Rikki Schlott says Mamdani “threatens to bring NYC back to bad old days” while Daily Mail U.S. correspondent Tom Leonard fears he “could bankrupt the once proud city I call home.”
“There is no shortage of experts,” adds Leonard, “arguing that Mamdani’s ideas are more likely to hurt the poorest New Yorkers than help them.”
Both the New York Times and Washington Post editorial boards have warned voters that they elect him at their peril.
Even a former Obama Treasury secretary, Jack Lew, believes the policies that Mamdani has “outlined are not policies that are good for New York.”
What is good for New York are the contributions of the billionaires Mamdani wants to erase. They invest, build, and create jobs. Their tax dollars keep the city government running. The philanthropy of billionaires funds health care centers and the cultural institutions New Yorkers hold dear. They are greater humanitarians than Mamdani will ever be, and every city, not just New York, needs more of them.
New York City cannot prosper without billionaires, but it would never miss Mamdani if he lost the election and moved to Los Angeles to record rap records bankrolled and directed by his mother.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Unleash Prosperity
Oh I like it. Mamdani vs the Muslim millionaires who have been taking over NYC shops.
Mamdani fighting the billionaires’ evil oligarchy…..
What a bunch of baloney. He’s in it for the money. Just watch and see.
And you New Yorkers will vote for this clown because (and I quote) “$10.00 for a plate of Halal chicken-over-rice is an OUTRAGE!!!”
The threat that naive voters would vote for Mamdani is a loud call to raise the voting age back to 21, at the least, where it had been before Vietnam.
To elect wiser and more responsible politicians, we need wiser and more responsible voters. What wisdom do 18 year olds have?
25 or even 30 would be a wiser voting age to strengthen all levels of government. The vast majority of 18 years olds are simply not interested in, not aware of, nor conversant with the important issues we vote on.
Raise the voting age to get better governments for all of us.
The billionaires, nonetheless, lined up to vote for Obama, just as the insurance executives because he told them secretly, he was their guy, that both he and they would become richer and they did.
The statement “But it would fall into a raging hellhole without billionaires.” is very strong and unsupported. We have good reason to think that NYC could live without billionaires. But making up for losing or removing billionaires, such as one who got the Central Park skating rink up and running years ago, could be harder, harder but useful to do that work themselves. (But don’t expect much from their own government, so full of incompetents.)