David Brady
Staff Writer
From a cursory scroll of NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s campaign website, you’re struck with a focus on, what is typically called, bread and butter issues. Mamdani’s campaign was centered around the affordability of New York City.
He promoted policies such as freezing rent, government run grocery stores and raising the minimum wage to $30 an hour. While they may, taken at face value, look appealing to those struggling to make ends meet, these policies will not address the issues they claim to repair.
The most obvious policy to dismiss is his promise of rent freezes, or more rent control. New York City is dense and ever growing, leading to continually increasing demand for housing and apartments. Prices aren’t a static phenomenon in the real world.
When policy makers play God with prices they never achieve the goals they wish. By holding prices below equilibrium, more people will demand the goods, in our case rentals, and less landlords will be willing to provide. This won’t make housing more affordable; it’ll take it off the market.
This economic approach was already proven a flop by President Nixon in the 1970s. He enacted price controls, which caused a shortage of gasoline and other goods. Producers had no reason to produce as much as people wanted and people demanded too much.
The same principles apply to minimum wages, but with it being a price ceiling instead of a price floor. Holding prices above what they should be results in a lower demand for labor and a surplus of labor, aka unemployment. This hurts the most disadvantaged laborers, such as people who can’t contribute more than $30 of value to a business per hour. If a business owner is losing money on a laborer every hour, they will not employ them. The only way to truly raise the wages of workers is to make them more productive.
City run grocery stores, another major proposal of Mamdani, especially those that operate off of tax revenue and without a profit, will be inefficient. Profit is a sign that resources are being allocated correctly. Without this signal, the only signs that aren’t operating correctly will be shortages, surpluses and food lines.
Right-wing critics of Mamdani have tried to spin this narrative where he’s somehow a closeted jihadist or antisemite. These claims were based on a moment from the New York Democratic mayoral primary, where the moderators asked the candidates which countries they would visit as mayor. While the other candidates each named Israel, Mamdani said that he would remain in New York. When pushed on whether he would visit Israel, he replies, “I will be standing up for Jewish New Yorkers and I will be meeting them wherever they are across the five boroughs.”
The moderators then go after Mamdani asking him if he believes Israel has a right to exist. Conservatives and establishment liberals like Andrew Cuomo alike all wanted to make the mayoral race about Israel. It appears that rather than address the issues that matter to New Yorkers, Mamdani’s opponents chose to chase smear tactics in hopes of hobbling his campaign.
By failing to discuss issues and policies relevant to New Yorkers, GOP candidate Curtis Sliwa and independent candidate Cuomo sealed their fates. The cards were always stacked against Sliwa as a Republican in New York, which is already an overwhelmingly blue city. Cuomo is also known as notoriously corrupt and responsible for throwing people sick with COVID-19 into nursing homes, as the New York Times reported in 2021. Even worse is the scandal that threw Cuomo out of office: his groping of women in his office, which he defended as resulting from cultural differences.
So, what is Mamdani’s positive vision? What does he stand for besides not being Republican or Andrew Cuomo? Here is where I begin to see the issues rise, in his embrace of Democratic Socialist economic policies that will not create the prosperity they promise.
New York City has seen Mamdani before. Politicians in the city have long enacted interventionist policies to voter demands. Mamdani isn’t anything new to the city, but that is precisely the problem with his solutions.
The average American doesn’t understand the results of the policies of Mamdani, which have been tried time and time again in New York to no success. But the people of New York haven’t seemed to learn they don’t work. Who are we to stop them from experimenting?
