Well, it looks as if President Donald Trump is right again. He has been unsparing in his assessment of the man most likely to be the next mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, and Mamdani has shot back that Trump is using attacks on him to distract citizens from the alleged dastardly war that Orange Man Bad is waging upon the American people. Yes, it’s preposterous and insulting as well, for if anyone is waging war against the American people, it’s the likes of Mamdani and his comrades, who want the United States to become the latest in the long line of countries to destroy itself in the process of finding out that socialism doesn’t work.
Trump has called Mamdani a “Communist lunatic,” and Mamdani has shot back petulantly that “Donald Trump is attacking me because he is desperate to distract from his war on working people. We must and we will fight back.” Yeah, that’s great, Zohran, but I couldn’t help but notice that you didn’t exactly insist that you weren’t a Communist (or a lunatic, for that matter). And that’s because such a denial would not only have been dishonest, but also would have been so obviously false and easily refutable that it could well have torpedoed his campaign altogether, as close as he is to ultimate victory. That’s because Zohran Mamdani is a Communist.
Fox News reported Thursday that in a 2021 video that is receiving new attention in light of his candidacy for mayor, Mamdani “urges fellow socialists at a conference to not compromise on goals like ‘seizing the means of production.’" Why, Karl Marx himself couldn’t have said it better. And “in a second video, released on YouTube by progressive advocacy group The Gravel Institute that same year, Mamdani discusses the need to turn housing from a private commodity to a public one, calling for luxury condos to be replaced with communal style living that would include things like shared laundry facilities and food co-ops.”
The abolition of private property and the confiscation of private homes were a cornerstone of the Communist Party’s program in the Soviet Union. On Aug. 20, 1918, the Central Executive Committee of the new Soviet state issued a decree mandating the “abolition of private real estate.” It stated: “The right to own a tract of land… within a city is abolished without exception,” and “the right to own buildings located in cities with a population of ten thousand or over and having… a value… in excess of the amount fixed by local authorities is abolished.” That included private homes, which were seized wholesale and, if large enough, converted into collective residences for the new slaves of the state.
That seems to be something like what Zohran Mamdani had in mind. He asked: "Why do so many people end up homeless?" Then he dismissed one wrong answer to that question and offered in its place a wrong answer of his own: "It's not because there aren't enough homes to go around, there are plenty of empty homes. No. It's because housing people is not a primary goal of developers or landlords. Their goal, simply put, is to make a profit." There’s the fundamental fallacy of Communism: that making a profit is wrong.
In reality, everyone deserves to be compensated for his labor and the fruit of his labor, including someone who builds a house. The idea that developers or landlords (and everyone else) should be expected to offer their labor for no compensation or reward is tantamount to saying that they should be slaves, and that’s exactly what Communism makes of everyone.
Continuing in the same vein, Mamdani complained that housing was "a consumer product, just like clothes or cars." And so, he claimed, there was plenty of housing for "the rich" but not enough for ordinary folk. The real reason why people are homeless, of course, has more to do with the explosion of drug addiction and the closing of mental hospitals than with greedy housing developers, but Mamdani showed no indication of being aware of that, or at least willing to admit it. He insisted that the present profit-based arrangement was “not efficient or beneficial for the rest of society,” and that “housing doesn't have to be seen as a market at all."
And so there goes another longstanding element of the American Dream: that if someone works hard and is careful with his money, he can buy a suitable home for his family. In place of this, Mamdani touted collective life, offering “a vision of communal living with shared laundry, kitchens, food co-ops, bathhouses, pharmacies, lecture halls, swimming pools and more.” He called for the establishment of "community land trusts to gradually buy up housing on the private market and convert it to community ownership." You dream of living in a college dorm when you're 50? You'll love Mamdani.
Related: Mamdani Thinks NYC Has the Money for Low-Cost Grocery Stores Because He Made This BIG Error
This would solve all our problems, the snake oil salesman assured us: "If we want to end the housing crisis, the solution has to be moving toward the full de-commodification of housing. In other words, moving away from the status quo in which most people access housing by purchasing it on the market and toward a future where we guarantee high quality housing to all as a human right."
Great. Government-guaranteed housing. It will be as high quality as government-guaranteed health care or government-guaranteed education. If you want the full picture of what Mamdani is offering as his vision of a bright future, read "The Gulag Archipelago."
