No.
I decided back in 1978 that the word “socialism” had been far too poisoned by Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev, Mao, Castro, Kim Il Sung, and company and by too many left-winger cosplay intellectual wannabee revolutionaries too interested in making their bones, I decided that it was not worth trying to reclaim by anyone who did not actively want to be a Joker—and the nasty Heath Ledger version at that—in the public-reason conversation of the anthology super-intelligence of humanity’s networked collective mind. I decided that anybody calling themself a “socialist” and hoping to get elected to anything in America was, given that history, the principal author of their own misfortunes.
I have never found any reason to ever regret that decision.
Still, I find myself annoyed when my malevolent feed feeds up someone like this from the usually highly perceptive David Levey:
David Levey: Socialism Yesterday & Today, Mamdani, & the Democratic Party <https://davidhlevey.substack.com/p/socialism-yesterday-and-today-mamdani>: ‘I grant that many of today's young socialists are impelled by the best of intentions and that their version is based more on a distorted picture of an idealized European (mostly Scandinavian) "social democracy" (deriving from the late 19th-century German Marxist Eduard Bernstein), than on the strain coming down from Lenin and Mao…
But:
David Levey: Socialism Yesterday & Today, Mamdani, & the Democratic Party <https://davidhlevey.substack.com/p/socialism-yesterday-and-today-mamdani>: ‘It rests on a misconception of the economic systems of countries like Denmark and Sweden… very much free-market systems at their productive core…. Alison Schrager…. “The returns to an economic elite job have also increased relative to the cultural elite… [who] made their career choices—they could have worked in finance too…. The tragedy is they are making choices that will make their problems worse. Either that, or the public safety issue will make the city more affordable—but not in a good way…. Markets come for you eventually”…. Tyler Cowen… social psychology… socialist sentiment today is… negative… bad feelings about [the] rich and successful people, resentment, and a dark pessimism…. Mamdani is recycling a lot of the worst socialist-leaning policy proposals: rent control, government-run stores, subsidies, high taxes on upper-income people, and minimum wage hikes…. Rob Henderson… "luxury beliefs"…
My immediate reaction to Levey is this: GROW UP!
Of what Levey calls the “the worst socialist-leaning policy proposals”, that is:
rent control,
government-run stores,
subsidies,
high taxes on upper-income people, and
minimum wage hikes,
a reality-based look at the situation here in the U.S today leads all except the blinkers and the grifters to say that we have:
(a) two full wins—more progressive taxes and higher minimum wages—
(b) two where the devil is in the details—“subsidies” (for what? how administered? how funded?) and government-run stores (where? in what sectors? how subsidized? how managed?)—
and only one-thing that I regard as a clear loser: (c) rent control.
That’s 3-2, +1 for Mamdani.
As opposed to the 0-5, -5 score for the typical sycophant to the grifter-klepto-crypto class that winds up being the Republican candidate for, well, pretty much everything these days.
How has David Levey managed to fail to get the memo about the technocratic work on the minimum-wage over the past generation? That as we seek to make work pay for the working poor, a combination of the EITC (which has administrative complexities, money leaking to employers) and a minimum wage (which has simple enforcement, at least for citizens—H1-B visa holders, green-card holders, and those like Elon Musk and Melanija Knavs whose papers are not in order need to beware—and a possible disemployment effect offset by the EITC) is the sweet spot? Plus, it really, really looks as though employers have enough monopsony power via people’s unwillingness to abandon their local knowledge by changing jobs that minimum wages push market prices in the labor market toward, not away the competitive=economy price. How come Levey is ignorant of all that?
Similarly, how has David Levey failed to get the memo about the nonexistence of the Laffer Curve here in the U.S.? Professional Republicans have been making forecasts of how tax cuts are going to pay for themselves for two generations. You might want to be charitable and claim that those who were doing so over 1976-1986 were naïve and overoptimistic. But—except for tariff reductions in the context of the globalized value-chain economy—since 1986 ever single person making this argument has had no excuse for doing so, and has to be judged either a flat-out liar or having made a choice to be so ignorant or stupid to such a degree that we reach the Grand Unification of ignorance and stupidity.
Am I wrong?
With government-run stores, we can go to the videotape":
Derek Thompson: <https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-speaks-to-me-about-abundance>: ‘With groceries… you have a plan to build a small fleet of public grocery stores.What is the problem here that you think city run grocery stores specifically can solve?
Zohran Mamdani: There are two problems… affordability…. food deserts…. I've heard from constituents time and again that there simply isn't high-quality produce within a five-block, 10-block radius, but I can find five, six different fast food restaurants in that same space…. This is a proposal of reasonable policy experimentation where we're talking about five stores, one store in each borough… cost[ing] $60 million in total… ess than half of what the city is currently set to spend on subsidizing… City Fresh…. City Fresh… doesn't require the supermarkets receiving the subsidy to accept SNAP or WIC.It doesn't require them to engage in collective bargaining…. It's just about trying to assist in their continued operation…. I think that the scale of this pilot program is one where we… [gain] the ability to prove out… the conversation with you around how do we prove the effectiveness. Because if it is not effective at a pilot level, it does not deserve to be scaled up…
If David H. Levey’s doctors are anything like mine, they are telling him every appointment that he has a behavioral-economics psychological failure every time he goes grocery shopping or to the restaurant: that his mind-body system cannot help but prioritize sweets and fats when it should be prioritizing protein, roughage, and vitamins and minerals. Every—every—every single sensible health economist right now is looking for ways to push back against this behavioral-economics psychological failure right now, which is the reason that it is not uncommon that we can find zero places with good produce (but shout out to Star Grocery and to Yasai Market here in Berkeley Elmwood) but six different fast-food restaurants within five blocks serving very yummy sweet, fatty, salty things within a five-block radius.
Is there any real objection to a pilot program to see if New York City can better spend some of the money it spends—with, as best as I can see, zero oversight and accountability—on City Fresh? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
As for Levey’s attack on Zamdani’s proposals for “subsidies”, that is too vague for there to be any need for any kind of response at all.
Look at Mamdani’s platform:
Zohran Mamdani: Zohran for NYC <https://www.zohranfornyc.com/>: ‘Freeze the rent…. As Mayor, Zohran will immediately freeze the rent for all stabilized tenants, and use every available resource to build the housing New Yorkers need…. Fast, fare free buses…. Zohran won New York’s first fare-free bus pilot on five lines across the city. As Mayor, he’ll permanently eliminate the fare on every city bus…. The Department of Community Safety…. Police have a critical role to play. But right now, we’re relying on them to deal with the failures of our social safety net—which prevents them from doing their actual jobs. Through this new city agency and whole-of-government approach, community safety will be prioritized like never before in NYC… mental health programs and crisis response…. No cost childcare… for every New Yorker aged 6 weeks to 5 years… and he will bring up wages for childcare workers… to be at parity with public school teachers….. City-owned grocery stores… focused on keeping prices low… we should redirect public money to a real “public option.” Housing by and for New York…. Zohran will put our public dollars to work and triple the City’s production of permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes—constructing 200,000 new units over the next 10 years… address the legacy of racially discriminatory zoning, increase density near transit hubs, end the requirement to build parking lots…. Cracking down on bad landlords…. Overhaul the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants and coordinate code enforcement under one roof…. Taxes on big corporations and the wealthiest New Yorkers…
If you are a plutocrat or a wannabee plutocrat, and if you have neither terrified yourself into being unwilling to leave your apartment, become so low-energy that you do not want to leave your apartment, nor trapped yourself as a gullible fool working all the time in the belief your bosses will do you favors later on—if you are such a person, than these days it is much more pleasant for much more than half a year to live in Manhattan than in Miami Beach. It is also much easier to make more money in Manhattan as well. Ditto for corporate headquarters: a corporation moving its HQ out of Manhattan has long been a not-unreliable long-term bear signal (especially if it moves it close to where its current CEO wants to retire to). There is surplus there which any rational increasing-returns-to-urbanization cost-allocation process would take steps to capture.
Is there enough harvestable surplus given America’s current political economy for a Mamdani mayorality to see the building and maintain high-quality public housing on the scale NYC needs, the offering free childcare to every pre-K, the paying childcare providers public-school salaries, and the making public transportation free?
God no! Aspirations need to be tied to gettable resources, and political campaigns that think it is clever to overpromise really annoy me.
No. Is Zohran Mamdani the best person to manage the government of New York City for the next four years? God no! The job calls for, like, a manager—a superb manager who understands resource allocation and organizing bureaucratic processes, albeit one who shares the values, desires, and goals of New York City-dwellers.
But David H. Levey has no alternative candidate for Mayor of New York City with a realistic path to electoral victory in November at the general election who would be a better mayor, does he?
And so he has no business smearing Zohran Mamdani as a second coming of Vladimir Lenin.
What happened to the Co-op that was at Telegraph and Alston (if memory serves) in 1962, when I started graduate school? It was part of the Twin Pines co-operative movement, with headquarters in Albert Lea, Minnesota. It seemed to be competitive with Safeway and Lucky, the two big private chains.
I agree completely that the best thing Momdani can do for all New Yorkers, including me, is to have a well run city with a good public school system. Hard enough to get that done. Keep Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, get a great superintendent of schools, someone excellent at running the MTA, and so on. Granted much of these need state agreement, and Cuomo has already shown himself to be anti-NY when he was governor.
As Edward Banfield argued in his 1970 classic Unheavenly Cities, socialism in one city is a losing proposition. House the current homeless population and more people will show up needing housing. Raise taxes too high and tax-payers will leave. Redistribution is best done at a national level. But great public management is available to everyone.
Republicans are the Mao Zedongs of our time. Bad economic ideas, (tariffs, subservient fed, corporate subsidies, anti science, anti history) bigotry, isolationism, and a league of fools.