Socialism always sells itself on empathy. New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s agenda—“free” public transit, frozen rents, and government-mandated equality—sounds merciful on the surface. But it rests on a fatal delusion: that force can manufacture fairness and that wealth can be ordered into existence.
The economists and moral philosophers of the Austrian School—Henry Hazlitt, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Tom Woods, Robert Murphy, and Ron Paul—proved that liberty and prosperity emerge only from voluntary exchange. Every government distortion of prices or property replaces the choices of millions with the dictates of a few.
Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom nailed it: what planners label “coordination” is simply a handful of officials overriding the spontaneous order of countless individuals acting freely. Mises showed socialism’s collapse is not merely logistical—it is ethical. Erase ownership, and you erase accountability. Hazlitt revealed that every “gift” paid with someone else’s work hides unseen damage. Together, these thinkers demonstrated that central planning can never equal the dispersed wisdom of free people making choices for themselves.
What Mamdani calls progress is, under Austrian logic, a recycled failure—ideas that the twentieth century already tested, broke, and discarded.
The Seen vs. the Unseen
Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson boils the discipline down to one rule: look not only to the immediate but to the secondary consequences. Mamdani’s rent caps fixate on today’s tenant relief while ignoring tomorrow’s housing drought. Cap rents and maintenance disappears; new construction stalls; occupants cling to artificially cheap units. New York’s postwar rent-control era delivered precisely what Hazlitt predicted—slums, arson for insurance, and mass abandonment.
The lesson extends far beyond housing. When wages are fixed above productivity, employment vanishes. When prices are capped below cost, goods disappear. When the government decrees “affordable” outcomes, the result is always scarcity. Hazlitt’s principle is timeless because incentives are timeless: people supply less of what is punished and more of what is rewarded.
Tom Woods brings the same warning into the twenty-first century in Meltdown: every “stimulus” or bailout politicians hail as relief diverts capital from productive hands to politically-connected ones. “Every dollar spent by the government,” Woods writes, “is a dollar first extracted from the wealth-creating private sector.” A policy that looks charitable at first glance quietly starves the real economy that sustains it.
Hazlitt’s lens exposes socialism’s moral blindness. It measures compassion by intent, while economics measures by outcome. Rent freezes, wage mandates, and “free” services appear merciful until the bill comes due—in shortages, disrepair, and unemployment. True affordability grows from permission to build, compete, and innovate, not from muffling the market signals that make those acts possible.
Why Central Planning Can’t Calculate
Mises delivered the decisive blow in “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth”: without private property in the means of production, there can be no genuine market prices; without prices, society cannot rationally allocate resources. Prices are not arbitrary numbers; they are the nervous system of civilization, translating billions of daily choices into usable information.
Strip away ownership and you kill the feedback loop. Bob Murphy explains in Choice that markets are not static equations but discovery engines. Entrepreneurs test ideas, absorb losses, and correct mistakes. Without profit and loss, errors compound indefinitely because no one pays for them personally.
Tom Woods applies the same logic to 2008: central banks rigging interest rates play socialist planner, distorting price signals and triggering malinvestment. The boom-bust cycle that followed was not capitalism gone wild—it was socialism in disguise, monetary manipulation masquerading as management. Mamdani’s “democratic planning” merely repeats that error on a municipal scale, trading organic coordination for bureaucratic guesswork.
Economic knowledge cannot be centralized. Every clerk who sets a “fair” rent, wage, or fare imagines himself wiser than the market that already reflects thousands of preferences. The planner’s arrogance is not compassion—it is conceit armed with coercion.
Benevolent Planning Still Ends in Chains
Hayek warned that even well-meaning control slides into tyranny, because economic direction demands political direction. Tell factories what to produce and you soon tell citizens where to live and what to earn. Daniel Hannan’s The New Road to Serfdom updated Hayek’s warning for our age: today’s serfdom arrives not by revolution but by regulation.
New York already lives this parable. To build, one must beg for permits. To rent, plead before boards. To ride the subway, subsidize a system drowning in $40 billion of debt. Mamdani’s “equity” agenda would tighten every knot in that bureaucratic web. Hayek foresaw it clearly: the more the state plans the economy, the less room remains for individuals to plan their own lives.
Ron Paul captured the American version in Liberty Defined: every new entitlement chips away a slice of freedom, and those slices rarely grow back. The endpoint is managed dependence—citizens “cared for” yet never in control. Bureaucratic compassion ends not in liberty but in quiet servitude.
Inflation: Socialism’s Silent Partner
“Sound money is inseparable from a free society,” Paul argued in End the Fed. “Inflation is the welfare-warfare state’s hidden tax.” Socialism is not financed only by visible levies—it is sustained by the printing press. Murray Rothbard called central banking “the engine of government growth,” because it allows politicians to spend what they could never tax openly.
Since Nixon severed the dollar’s last tie to gold in 1971, its purchasing power has fallen by more than eighty-five percent. Mamdani treats that inflation as justification for even more spending, debt, and regulation. He mistakes the disease for the cure. Rothbard’s What Has Government Done to Our Money? explains that inflation lets the state counterfeit claims on real goods, quietly transferring wealth from savers to spenders and from workers to the politically connected.
Equality begins with honest money. When currency cannot be diluted, the government must live within its means, savings retain value, and the poor are no longer robbed by invisible taxation. Fiat money is socialism’s bloodstream; sound money is liberty’s immune system.
“Free” Is Never Free
Hazlitt’s verdict in The Failure of the New Economics remains unanswerable: government cannot give anyone anything it does not first take from someone else. Mamdani’s “fare-free” transit and universal childcare are sleight-of-hand tricks that disguise coercion as kindness. The seen image is the smiling passenger stepping onto the bus; the unseen reality is the overtaxed worker footing the bill and the entrepreneur deterred from creating a better alternative.
New York’s transit authority already lugs tens of billions in debt. Making rides “free” simply accelerates the crash. Woods observed in Rollback that monopoly public services fail hardest because failure never threatens their existence—it merely swells their budgets. Murphy adds the axiom every planner forgets: only production creates wealth; redistribution merely rearranges it. Socialism confuses the circulation of money with the creation of value.
The more the state promises something for nothing, the less of everything citizens actually receive.
Collectivism’s Moral Rot
Mises wrote in Socialism that abolishing property dissolves duty into dependency. When excellence is punished and mediocrity rewarded, virtue withers. Society begins to envy rather than emulate success. Jack Posobiec’s Unhumans traces this moral decay through the communist revolutions of the last century: before they seized assets, the planners first dehumanized their victims as “class enemies.” Modern “democratic” socialism may not build gulags, but it preserves the same premise—that coercion can manufacture virtue.
Ron Paul distilled the moral cost in one sentence: when government replaces charity, it replaces conscience. A person accustomed to outsourcing compassion soon forgets how to practice it freely.
History’s Scorecard
History’s scoreboard is merciless. Post-war Britain nationalized industries and became the “sick man of Europe” until Thatcher reversed course. Venezuela—once Latin America’s richest nation—descended into famine and exile within a decade of “Bolivarian socialism.” Even Sweden—long hailed as the “third way”—nearly bankrupted its welfare state in the early 1990s before liberalizing taxes and regulation.
The pattern repeats because the cause is constant: suppress price, property, and profit, and prosperity suffocates. Woods calls today’s version “soft totalitarianism by spreadsheet.” No bayonets are needed—just forms, fees, and endless compliance departments. The Black Book of Communism counts more than one hundred million deaths under hard socialism, but the soft version erodes freedom in slower, quieter ways.
The Way Out
Mises framed the issue with crystalline clarity: “The issue is always freedom versus government control.” The road back from socialism is the same one that led humanity out of poverty—property, prices, and peace.
First, restore sound money. End the inflation that lets politicians spend tomorrow’s wealth today.
Second, return power locally. Hannan and Woods remind us that self-government begins with self-reliance. Families, churches, and voluntary associations must reclaim the compassion that bureaucracies now counterfeit.
Third, recover moral clarity. Markets discipline greed through loss; governments discipline dissent through punishment. Only the first preserves human dignity.
Wherever ownership, exchange, and creativity are left free, life improves. Wherever obedience is mandated “for the common good,” life atrophies. New York—and America—does not need a better socialism. It needs a renewed commitment to liberty.
