Conservatives and Republicans are up in arms over the nomination and likely election of Zohran Mamdani, a self-described socialist, as mayor of New York City. The right-wingers are shocked — shocked! — that people could actually elect a died-in-the-wool socialist to serve as mayor of the nation’s largest city.
Come on! Who are they fooling? Even though they are loathe to admit it, conservatives and Republicans are every bit as socialist as Mamdani.
Consider Mamdani’s hope of establishing government-run grocery stores that will be run as profit-free enterprises. As a true-blue socialist, he says that these socialist stores will help the poor.
Not so, respond the right-wingers. They point out, rightly, that these socialist stores might well run small neighborhood grocery stores that cater to the poor out of business. What will be left will be inefficient and abusive government-run stores that will inevitably rely on ever-increasing amounts of taxpayer-funded largess to fund them. Has anyone been to the Post Office lately?
But wait a minute! Aren’t conservatives and Republicans ardent supporters of public (i.e. government) schools? Don’t they crow about how everyone gets to send their children for free to these government-run educational facilities?
In fact, it would be difficult to find a better example of a socialist program than public schooling. It’s funded by the coercion of taxation. It gets its customers through compulsory-attendance laws. Its textbooks and curriculum are determined by the state. The program is based on regimentation, indoctrination, deference to authority, rules and regulations, and obedience to orders. Public schooling can easily by called Army-Lite.
So, what’s the difference between supporting government-run grocery stores and government-run schools? Isn’t food more important than education? If the government is going to run schools, as right-wingers want, what’s their objection to it running grocery stores too?
In fact, consider school vouchers, which every right-winger in the country — and also, unfortunately, even quite a few libertarians — favor. It’s another socialist program, one that is based on using the coercive tax apparatus of the state to take money from people to whom it belongs in order to give it to people to whom it does not belong. That’s classic socialism.
In fact, show me one single Republican or conservative who opposes Social Security and Medicare, two socialist programs that are the crown jewels of America’s welfare-state way of life. You can’t do it. How are those two socialist programs different, in principle, from Mamdani’s socialist programs?
Contrary to popular opinion, Social Security is not a retirement program. Nobody “puts into the system” and the government doesn’t give people “their money back.” Social Security is a pure welfare program, no different from food stamps, one in which the IRS seizes the income of seniors’ children and then the Social Security Administration distributes the loot to their parents. Again, classic socialism. After all, they don’t call it “Social” Security for nothing. The concept even originated among socialists in Germany and later imported into the United States.
It’s no different with Medicare. It destroyed the finest healthcare system in the world, one based on free-market principles. In the 1950s and 1960s, healthcare costs were low and stable. Going to the doctor was like going to the (privately owned) grocery store. Nobody even needed medical insurance. Doctors and hospitals treated the poor for free voluntarily, as part of what they considered to be their ethical or moral duty. Doctors loved what they did in life.
Medicare and Medicaid destroyed all that. Healthcare socialism is what caused medical prices to begin soaring through the roof. That’s what gave us the ongoing, never-ending, perpetual healthcare crisis, one that is inexorably leading us to a full-fledged socialist healthcare system, just like in Cuba, which left-wingers continue to extol (along with Cuba’s public school system).
Yet, Republicans and conservatives, even while railing against Mamdani’s socialism, continue to ardently support these two massive socialist programs — Social Security and Medicare, both of which are contributing to the slow-motion move toward national bankruptcy.
Right-wingers, especially the millionaires and billionaires in New York City, also exclaim against Mamdani’s wish to equalize wealth — that is, using the government to take from the rich to give to the poor. Yet, don’t these same right-wingers believe in the progressive income tax and the welfare state themselves? Isn’t equalization of wealth one of the major justifications for the income tax and the welfare state?
In other words, in all their denunciations of Mamdani’s socialism, how many Republicans and conservatives advocate the repeal, not reduction or reform, of the entire federal income tax and a total dismantling of the welfare-state way of life that FDR foisted onto the American people in the 1930s? None! That’s because they all believe in socialism, albeit in different degrees and aspects than Mamdani. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, “We are all socialists now!” (Well, not all of us!)
Our American ancestors, who rejected income taxation, the IRS, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the entire welfare state, along with things like paper money, the Federal Reserve, the national-security state, the war on drugs, foreign wars and interventionism, and the war on immigrants, for more than 100 years had it right. They understood that a free, prosperous, and charitable society is necessarily one in which people are free to keep everything they earn and decide for themselves what to do with their own money. I’m with them.
