Getting It Wrong in New York City and Elsewhere

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, June 27, 2025

 

I keep hearing from fans of Zohran Mamdani and I can’t even. My basic response is: Are we really doing this?

 

Mamdani, who won Tuesday’s Democratic primary for New York City mayor, says he’s going to “resolve” capitalism’s assault on dignity and inequality there when he assumes office. Having successfully shepherded a state bill to allow visitors to drink on the premises of Astoria’s Museum of the Moving Image, who would dare doubt he’s up to the job?

 

I’m sorry, I understand it is fashionable to see Mamdani as an answer to some profound questions or perceived crises about society, economics, politics, etc. I get that some people are very sincere in their hopes and admiration for this guy.

 

I just think you’re all wrong. Not a little wrong. Not merely possibly wrong. But obviously, clearly, and foreseeably wrong.

 

On this, I have absolutely no doubt. If elected mayor, Mamdani may not be a political failure (though I’d bet that way). But if you think he has any chance of solving the problems with capitalism—as the left defines them—or if you think he’s going to deliver some transformative epoch of governance and equality, I think you’re just making a fool of yourself.

 

You people know that New York City residents can leave, right? You get that the rich people he wants to make pay for All The Things can leave pretty easily, right? In other words, the closer he gets to his idea of success the more rapidly the people and businesses he needs to shake down to be successful will leave.

 

I think Mamdani is a charming, glib guy with some heinous positions on Israel and some dumb ones about economics. Indeed, he has precisely the kinds of public policy answers I’d expect from an English major from Bowdoin College. Mamadani was actually an Africana Studies major at Bowdoin. So, close enough.

 

His proposals are mostly stupid or naive on political or economic grounds—or both. He can’t do some of the things he wants to do—because NYC mayors don’t have that power—and some things he wants to do won’t work because they never do. It’s amazing how candidates of “new ideas” never offer any. Rent freezes are not a new idea. Free public transportation, nationalized utilities, government-owned grocery stores—these aren’t new ideas, people. They only seem new if you don’t know or care about the past or, really, public policy at all.

 

And that’s my real point. He’s just not a serious candidate for the problems facing New York City or the country. But he makes the people voting for him feel good. We’ve seen this before, of course. Barack Obama promised the fundamental transformation of American society. His wife even promised Obama would fix our broken souls, or something.

 

How many souls got fixed during his two terms? Did we ever get a final count?

 

Look, at some point people are going to have to realize that voting for a candidate based on how he or she makes you feel is just a really stupid way to run a country. We don’t hire mechanics or surgeons based on how they make us feel. Some people do choose therapists or pastors based on how they make them feel. And that should be a tell. Politicians are not therapists or pastors, and there’s nothing they can do from Gracie Mansion or the White House to fix your souls or psyches. If you want or need that, get therapy or find God. Just don’t look for God in politics.

 

Notes on proceduralism.

 

Let’s change gears before I get really dyspeptic.

 

On Wednesday, I wrote about how a lot of people in foreign policy care more about the process than the purposes of the process. There were a couple of points I wanted to get to that I didn’t.

 

The first point I wanted to make is that this tendency in foreign policy has an analog in domestic policy. A lot of the reasons education is so hard to reform—from the structure of the school day, to the way reading is (or isn’t) taught, to school choice—is because a lot of people are invested in the existing process more than they are in what the process was created to do. As a bureaucratic and political reality, educating kids is a second-order concern for a lot of the education establishment; the primary goal is making sure the educators maintain their monopolies.

 

They won’t say so that often, but this is the basic argument of the “Abundance Democrats.” Their big hangup is with “proceduralism.”

 

They don’t see it so much in education, but they rightly see the problem of proceduralism in housing—and infrastructure generally.

 

Now, proceduralism is just one of the fancy terms that, more or less, refer to the same sorts of problems. Similar buzzphrases might include “vetocracy” (Francis Fukuyama), “kludgeocracy” (Steve Teles), and related concepts like “regulatory capture” (pioneered by George Stigler but fleshed out by the whole Public Choice Theory crew). Most normal people call it “red tape” (a term believed to originate with Spanish King Charles V’s practice of wrapping important royal edicts and papers with a red ribbon. The practice was adopted by the Brits, which is where we get the term).

 

The basic argument of the Abundance Dems is that progressives have stymied the government’s ability to get stuff done because progressives themselves have become addicted to checking bureaucratic boxes and allowing interest groups and activists to clog the courts with claims of insufficient box-checking. Law professor Nicholas Bagley calls this the “procedure fetish.”

 

Now, a couple of things about this. First, I think the Abundance Democrats should show a little character and flourish and borrow from the Italians. Instead of “Abundance Democrats,” they should call themselves Abbondanza Democrats! or Democratici dell’abbondanza—it just sounds better. Maybe if Andrew Cuomo had leaned into that?

 

More importantly, speaking for three or four generations of conservatives, libertarians, Public Choice economists, and, like, millions of normal Americans, I just want to say, “We told you so.”

 

What I mean is, this obsession with procedure has been an obvious problem for decades. And conservatives and libertarians have been saying so for, well, decades. It wasn’t until housing and climate change became such pressing issues that some wonks realized that maybe their team was the problem—especially when places run by progressives have the hardest time getting anything done.

 

But just for the record, Albert Jay Nock was railing against the sclerotic and imperial burdens of bureaucracy way back in the 1930s. Ludwig von Mises wrote a book about this stuff, helpfully titled Bureaucracy, in 1944. I’ll admit he could be a bit strident:

 

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.

 

“Instead of Lincoln’s government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people,’” Milton Friedman wrote in Why Government is the Problem, “we now have a government ‘of the people, by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats.’”

 

I could go on, but you get the point.

 

I welcome the Abundance Dems recognizing that red tape, NIMBYism, etc. are a problem. But I wish they read more of those guys quoted above. The problem with economic planning isn’t primarily that it’s too hard because of red tape. The chief problem with economic planning—even super-efficient economic planning of the sort many of them crave—is that economic planners get stuff wrong.

 

That said, I do agree that if we do decide to build a road or power plant or rail project, it would be better to do it quickly and efficiently rather than slowly and expensively. So you still get one-and-a-half cheers from me for the Team Abbondanza!