New York City voters just elected self-described socialist, Zohran Mamdani, to be their next Mayor. His campaign had a clear message: vote for me and I’ll give you free stuff. Free transportation, free groceries, free rent. Maybe if the campaign went on a few more weeks, he would’ve promised free Netflix.
The first problem with his promises is that none of this stuff is actually free. Mamdani’s free buses proposal alone would cost $800 million. If you add up the costs of all of Mamdani’s free stuff promises, you get a grand total of $7 billion – that’s more than the entire NYPD budget. Where is Mamdani going to find all this money to pay for this? Luckily for him, it’s just sitting in your pockets. Mamdani at least admits that he is going to hike taxes to pay for all of it – I think we have a different definition of the word “free”.
The other problem with Mamdani’s promises is that many of them have been tried before, and they have failed every time. State-run grocery stores? That was tried in the Soviet Union. It led to breadlines and people unable to get food because the grocery stores were empty. Venezuela also gave it a try. Same result, breadlines. They even tried this socialist scheme in Kansas City. The city pulled the plug on the project, but not before flushing tens of millions of taxpayer dollars down the drain – all for a store that operated at a significant loss and had empty shelves most days. By the time the store closed it became known around the city as a hotbed for drug dealing.
If only New Yorkers had listened to Milton Friedman’s famous quote: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”