This column is for all my colleagues and friends who have been telling me how wrong I am about Mayor Zohran Mamdani because \u201cdemocratic socialists\u201d aren\u2019t the same as \u201ccommunists.\u201d <\/p>\n
I hope they were all listening to Mamdani\u2019s inaugural address the other day. <\/p>\n
If you missed it, here\u2019s a topline quote from our new mayor: \u201cWe will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.\u201d <\/p>\n
Spoken like a true commissar. Thanks, comrade!<\/p>\n
The Soviets tried collectivism on an industrial scale for more than 70 years. <\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what the world got out of it: Mass murder. Starvation. Gulags. Forced labor. Secret police. An Iron Curtain dividing Europe. A world too often on the precipice of nuclear war. <\/p>\n
It was an ideology of fear, suspicion and slavery, where you could be taken off the street for doing something subversive like criticizing the government. <\/p>\n
There was no free speech. No free elections. No freedom of assembly. No due process. <\/p>\n
Scientists, thinkers and artists were silenced or killed. <\/p>\n
Yeah, collectivism really worked out well for humanity. <\/p>\n
OK, so that\u2019s not New York City. At least not yet. <\/p>\n
But remember this: Top-down types on both sides of the aisle will tell you exactly what they plan to do. <\/p>\n
President Donald Trump has done it his whole life. And Mamdani is doing it now. <\/p>\n
The fools are the people among us who refuse to take them at their word. <\/p>\n
The only way collectivism works is if everybody does it. And given that a lot of us still have free wills and minds of our own (never mind private property), the only way to make all of us do any one thing is to force us to do so. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s what the secret police and gulags were for in the USSR. <\/p>\n
How Mamdani plans to force total compliance with his grand designs in what is still a free and democratic society is frankly a mystery. <\/p>\n
But the new mayor is leaving no doubt what he has in mind: Nothing short of total revolution when it comes to how business is done in the five boroughs. And as a collectivist, he\u2019s promising that everyone will share equally in the spoils.<\/p>\n
But remember this from history: Not everybody in the Soviet Union shared in the pain of waiting on huge lines at the government-run supermarket and other communist privations. <\/p>\n
No, the national leaders and Communist Party bigwigs had their dachas and limousines. The wealth was not spread around. The oligarchs and their connected cronies divvied up the spoils. <\/p>\n
Just like in America, kids!<\/p>\n
A lot of Mamdani voters, including all those Zoomers, don\u2019t remember the Cold War. They clearly don\u2019t appreciate the history of human and political oppression in Soviet Russia and other \u201csocialist\u201d countries. <\/p>\n
They just think that everything\u2019s going to be groovy now. There\u2019ll be lots of free stuff and all the needy people will be taken care of. <\/p>\n
They don\u2019t trouble themselves thinking about how it will actually happen, or, most importantly, how any of it will be paid for. <\/p>\n
They may have to learn the hard way. <\/p>\n
Give me good old, frigid rugged individualism any day. It\u2019s served us Americans pretty well here for 250 years. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This column is for all my colleagues and friends who have been telling me how wrong I am…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93181,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[9,24,63,134,136,135],"class_list":{"0":"post-93180","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-staten-island","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-new-york-city","10":"tag-nyc","11":"tag-staten-island","12":"tag-staten-island-headlines","13":"tag-staten-island-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93180","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=93180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93180\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}