{"id":89471,"date":"2026-01-05T10:06:31","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T10:06:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/89471\/"},"modified":"2026-01-05T10:06:31","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T10:06:31","slug":"mamdani-is-the-fresh-face-of-old-and-discredited-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/89471\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamdani is the fresh face of old and discredited ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the surface, it\u2019s easy to see why New York City<\/a> elected Zohran Mamdani<\/a> mayor. The charming state assemblyman put New York first during his campaign, all while smiling blithely, a proverbial cat in the sun.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ask a random person on the street why NYC opted for Mamdani, and you\u2019ll likely hear something along the lines of, \u201cWe needed to try something new.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an understandable impulse for the perpetually mismanaged city. The problem is that none of Mamdani\u2019s policy proposals are new. In fact, Mamdani\u2019s ideas are quite old and well-tested. And if the past is prologue, New York City will suffer mightily for being snookered into believing the dusty, discredited ideas of 20th-century collectivism have suddenly become fresh and viable.<\/p>\n

Take the new mayor\u2019s signature policy of rent freezes. In the 1970s, Massachusetts<\/a> allowed Boston and other large cities to cap rent increases. The results were catastrophic. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found that housing supply shrank by roughly 10%<\/a> during that time. Meanwhile, rental homes fell into disrepair as landlords were unable to keep up with costs. New constructions nearly ceased.<\/p>\n

Ironically, the policy hurt low-income renters most of all.\u00a0The rent caps disincentivized landlords from caring for their properties, deteriorating the housing<\/a> quality, while the supply shortage drove up prices, making it harder for new renters, often low-income families moving for work, to find affordable homes.<\/p>\n

San Francisco\u2019s<\/a> dalliance with rent freezes in the 1990s caused a similar catastrophe. According to a recent American Economic Review study on the policy, freezing rents may have protected incumbent renters from immediate displacement, but it likewise diminished housing supply<\/a>, making rents skyrocket in the long term and ultimately defeating the purpose of the policy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rent freezes haven\u2019t worked overseas, either. A 2020 rent freeze in Berlin caused a 57% drop in available apartments, leading to skyrocketing rents in the unregulated market.<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s plan differs slightly from those of Massachusetts, San Francisco, and Berlin. In one sense, it\u2019s more targeted, as it\u2019s limited to the existing 1 million rent-stabilized apartments in New York City. In another, it\u2019s far more radical. He has pledged a zero percent flat rent freeze, whereas the other cities had mechanisms for a small annual adjustment to keep up with inflation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Will Mamdani finally be the first to implement a rent freeze plan that doesn\u2019t end in disaster? Historical odds aren\u2019t in his favor.<\/p>\n

Another old idea being put to fresh use is Mamdani\u2019s proposal to set up five municipally owned, non-profit grocery stores in high-poverty areas. Whether it\u2019s five or 500 doesn\u2019t matter, because the underlying principle doesn\u2019t work on any scale.<\/p>\n

In the early 2000s,\u00a0Venezuela<\/a>\u00a0established state-run grocery store networks and price controls under the government of Hugo Ch\u00e1vez. This government food distribution system depended on the country\u2019s oil wealth. Predictably, food became scarce the moment oil prices plummeted in late 2014. The government could no longer subsidize prices to make them affordable to the poor. This led to massive shortages, hyperinflation, stores with empty shelves, and reliance on the black market. Venezuelan poverty skyrocketed.\u00a0A 2017 survey found\u00a0that 9.6 million people ate two or fewer meals a day and, 93% of the population couldn\u2019t afford food<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to see why: government-run industries are inevitably plagued by corruption, mismanagement, and a resulting lack of profitability. Managing a large and complex business requires expertise and an incentive structure that keeps its component parts operating efficiently and innovating when necessary. For a government bureaucracy, this isn\u2019t exactly in the wheelhouse.<\/p>\n

Small-scale government-owned grocery stores in the United States have similarly failed. As recently as last August, a Kansas City grocery store that received $18 million in city investments closed. The cause?<\/a>\u00a0Economic mismanagement, poor incentive structures, high rates of theft, bare shelves \u2014 everything you\u2019d expect from a government-run grocery store. It\u2019s the same foolish utopianism that has willfully disregarded basic human nature and economic principles for centuries.<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s plan to \u201creimagine public safety\u201d also has a recent track record of abject failure. In cities that embraced the \u201cdefund the police<\/a>\u201d movement, murder rates quickly spiked. Voters in these cities were similarly quick to pull back from the brink. Minneapolis voted down<\/a> a ballot measure that would abolish the police department in 2021, and Portland, Oregon\u2019s mayor renounced the movement. In New York City, murders climbed 44% during a period of declining arrests between May 2020 and February 2022. But when the New York City Police Department began repolicing under then-Mayor Eric Adams<\/a>, arrests climbed, and murders dropped.<\/p>\n

Should Mamdani make good on his campaign promises, Gotham will revert to chaos.\u00a0<\/p>\n

VIDEO: MAMDANI VOIDS ADAMS\u2019S PRO-ISRAEL EXECUTIVE ORDERS ON DAY ONE AS MAYOR<\/a><\/p>\n

At his inauguration this week, the new mayor vowed to replace \u201cthe frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.\u201d His immense political talent enables him to introduce socialism<\/a> as if it were a fresh idea. But it\u2019s an ideology as old as the hills and twice as rocky.\u00a0It doesn\u2019t work \u2014 it never has, and it never will.<\/p>\n

All that remains to be seen is whether he will continue to smile while America\u2019s greatest city crumbles. Or whether he will, like so many failed collectivists before him, turn dark as the hole keeps getting deeper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the surface, it\u2019s easy to see why New York City elected Zohran Mamdani mayor. The charming state…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":89472,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[25806,2907,11539,9,24,11,10,49,51,50,8725,1211,7318,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-89471","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-defund-the-police","9":"tag-housing","10":"tag-massachusetts","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-new-york-headlines","14":"tag-new-york-news","15":"tag-new-york-state","16":"tag-new-york-state-headlines","17":"tag-new-york-state-news","18":"tag-san-francisco","19":"tag-socialism","20":"tag-venezuela","21":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}