Something for Nothing, Again

‘The future is in our hands.’

–Zohran Mamdani

“And so it begins” said Donald Trump.

Wrong about so many things, about this…he is probably right. Uh oh.

US politics seem to have descended into a kind of ricocheting disgust. Fed up with one foolishness…voters try another, bouncing off lunacy only to run right into absurdity. And unless Mr. Trump burns down the Reichstag and suspends elections, American voters are likely to turn against him in the next election. Like Trump, Mamdani is an activist. A big spender. New York already spends more per person than any other big city in America; Mamdani aims to spend more. His selling proposition: he is not Donald J. Trump.

The Washington Post:

This election was about Trump. He endorsed major Republican candidates and tied all of these elections to his efforts to lower the cost of living: “If affordability is your issue, VOTE REPUBLICAN!” he posted on social media. But prices are up, Trump is broadly unpopular, and Democratic candidates welcomed making their elections about Trump. Network exit polls showed that most voters in Virginia and New Jersey voters disapproved of Trump.

We barely thought it was possible. Could anyone be elected with worse policies than those of Donald Trump? But New Yorkers have done it. Forbes tells us what Mamdani is fixing to do:

Rent stabilization freeze.

City-Owned Grocery Stores

Arresting Benjamin Netanyahu

Free buses and childcare

Regulating delivery apps

Creating a “Mom-and-Pop czar” [to promote small businesses]

Mamdani’s campaign platform says his agenda will be paid for by tax increases, including adding a flat 2% tax increase on the 1% of New Yorkers earning more than $1 million per year. He also proposed hiking the corporate tax rate from 9% to 11.5% to match New Jersey’s rate—which his campaign says will bring in an additional $5 billion annually for the city.

What is interesting about these proposals (save arresting Netanyahu) is that everyone knows, or should know, they won’t work.

One of our sons lived in New York for a while. (Brooklyn seems to call to young people like the Lorelei to drunken boatmen.) We drove up in our pick-up to take him some furniture. We were appalled by how shabby and expensive the apartment was. The carpet on the stairs was squishy and looked as though it dated from the 1960s. There were holes in the floor. And the bathroom must have been a relic of the early days of indoor plumbing.

“Rent control,” a neighbor explained. “It didn’t make sense to make improvements. You couldn’t raise the rent.”

Every ‘something for nothing’ government program is actually a transfer program. The feds produce no wealth. They merely take it from some people and give it to another. The struggle for political power is merely a contest to see who gets what. And when the public gets weary of being ripped off by one group…it turns to the other.

Mr. Trump is proud of the stock market, for example; it has hit many ‘All Time Highs’ during his time in office. But unless real wealth is being added, the stock market is just another way to transfer wealth. Most people have no serious stock ownership. In the words of Wall Street, they are ‘short’ the market. So, when the Fed gooses up stock prices with lower interest rates, the average person is (relatively) poorer, not richer.

Tariffs, too, transfer money, they don’t create it. Americans will get something for nothing, says Trump; foreigners will pay. But the cash goes from the working class (consumers) to the ruling class (the feds and their donors, cronies, and clients).

Rent control transfers wealth from apartment owners to apartment renters (there are a lot of them in New York). Even though New York faces a housing shortage there are said to be some 20,000 to 60,000 ‘rent-stabilized’ units that are vacant because landlords can’t afford to repair them.

So what we have in the Mamdani triumph is a switch from one group of failed policies…to another group of failed policies. Both of them, on the right and on the left, are based on the same failed idea — that ‘something for nothing’ is a durable, successful policy choice. And now they race ahead to see which will go broke first – NYC or USA.

More to come…but the gist of it is that Trump is probably right. After the public gets fed up with his failures, they will not turn away from his ‘something for nothing’ policies; they will still want them, but in a different wrapper.

Tune in tomorrow…