Businesses are fleeing New York City, and really, who can blame them? For years now, the left has had complete political hegemony in Gotham, and has instituted a maze of confiscatory tax policies that have made the cost of doing business in the city prohibitive, and the forest of accompanying regulations virtually impossible to navigate. The situation was bad enough during the mayoral tenures of Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio, and Eric Adams. Now that the socialist wunderkind Zohran Mamdani is mayor, however, the flight is likely to accelerate exponentially.
After all, the man in Gracie Mansion has made it clear that he doesn’t like billionaires and doesn’t believe they exist. They are, of course, the people who own the most consequential businesses in the city. The mayor doesn’t want them there, and to an extent that will make many wish he had never become mayor, he is likely to get his wish.
The Center Square reported Friday that New York City “lost nearly 5,000 businesses early last year as employers closed their doors or left for other low-tax states, according to a new report.” And yes, much, much worse is coming: “The analysis comes as newly elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani pushes to hike business taxes to foot the bill for his agenda.”
The Economic Development Corporation’s report “showed more than 3,500 new businesses opened their doors in New York City during the second quarter of the fiscal year but that was offset by a loss of about 8,400 employers.” By way of comparison, “that's the weakest quarter for business formation since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.” When you pause for a moment to remember how absurd it would have sounded to announce that you were opening a business at the height of the COVID hysteria, you see how bad this really is.
Leftist ideologues, however, never learn a thing from common sense, or experience, or history. After all, the fact that Mamdani, as Intifada on the Hudson: The Selling of Zohran Mamdani shows, is a committed socialist who dreams of the day when he and his comrades will be able to seize the means of production, is a quintessential example of that grim reality.
The October Revolution was 108 years ago now, and since then, the world has seen all too many examples of what happens when Mamdani’s fellow socialists take state power, and when governments are institutionally opposed to businesses. If any political idea has ever been proven not to work, it is socialism, and its failure has been proven abundantly and repeatedly, with no counter-examples. Yet here is New York about to dive into the same fetid pool yet again.
The report, says Center Square, “is the latest to highlight New York City's shrinking business sector with employers looking to other low-tax states as Albany piles on new regulations and costs.” It’s just common sense. If you’re going to confiscate massive portions of my income if I do business in City X, but City Y will allow me to keep a bit more of what I have earned, I’m going to opt to do business in City Y. The costs and hazards of opening a new business are numerous enough without the government coming around in the guise of a classic mafioso, demanding protection money for an increasingly spurious and hollow protection.
Mamdani, however, with his previous calls to defund the police, appears less interested in protecting the people of his crime-ridden city at all than he is in making sure that his cronies get the perks that cronies always get in socialist polities: he “seeks to draw up support for higher taxes to pay for plans for universal childcare, tuition free college and free bus service in the city.”
Related: Yes, Mamdani Is a Commie. Will the ‘News’ Outlets That Insisted He Wasn’t Apologize Now?
This is gonna hurt. The boy mayor’s scheme will increase the top corporate tax rate to 11.5%. Right now it’s bad enough, at 7.25%, and the only result of such a massive increase will be fewer businesses and more unemployment in New York City, which will mean more wards of the state, and more money needed for welfare, which will mean even higher taxes, and the cycle will continue until the city is impoverished and bankrupt.
This and his other socialist schemes have “fueled concerns about an exodus of major employers from the nation's largest city, with low-tax states like New Hampshire and Florida urging New York City businesses to relocate.” And many will. What young Mamdani will eventually learn is that there was a good reason for the Berlin Wall from the point of view of East Berlin’s socialist overlords, and that was to prevent the productive from fleeing and destroying the whole socialist party-with-other-people’s-money. But he is not going to be able to build a wall around New York City, and anyone who can leave, will leave. By the time it is generally recognized that socialism has failed again, Mamdani himself may be one of the few wealthy people left in his ruined domains.
