Future NYC Mayor Mamdani: Private Property and Free Markets Are the Enemy
Hey there friends! Below are the videos and articles I referenced in preparation for this week’s video commentary. Enjoy!
Zohran Mamdani is poster child for ‘luxury beliefs’ - The Times
Socioeconomic breakdown of NYC mayoral primary results - Owen Winter on X (Twitter)
TikTok over talk shows: How Zohran Mamdani won with NYC influencers - PR Week
Charted: U.S. Median House Prices vs. Income - Visual Capitalist
America Has Plenty of Experience With Government-Run Stores, and It Isn't Pretty - Reason
I graduated from college in the early 1980s with a couple of majors including Economics. My college Econ program taught typical micro/macro courses, but its leaning was very Keynesian. They government, I was taught, could fine tune the economy through smart monetary and fiscal policy that could help everyone.
I got married and spent the next 20ish years raising two children. We were busy with life, and I did virtually no reading outside of work. My youngest son took classical guitar lessons from a local music school. I got to talking with one of the other parents (Ned) whose son had lessons right after my son, and to both our surprises, we had both grown up in the same mid-sized town and both had gone to the same high school graduating in different years. We started a friendship. My friend was a voracious reader and seemed to have some intelligent grasp of a large number of topics.
When my children were in high school, I had more free time and I decided to follow Ned’s lead and read a bit more. Having majored in Economics, I picked up the book, “Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One”, by an author I had never heard of, Thomas Sowell. I found that book easy to read and his arguments sound. I went to see if he had any other books, and to my surprise, Sowell had written over 40 books. Other than a couple of his out-of-print books, a few of his books on economic though (Marx, etc.) and his books on late talking children, I read everything. Reading Sowell, got me to re-read some of Milton Friedman that I had read years ago, along with Hayek, and John Stossel. My economic thinking went from being left of center, to libertarian.
I am currently reading a collection of Milton Friedman’s newspaper articles called “Bright Promises, Dismal Performance”. When I think of that title, and other books by Thomas Sowell (A Conflict of Visions, The Vision of the Anointed, The Quest for Cosmic Justice), I realize that visions such as Socialism, sound good on the surface. Who could be opposed to more people living better lives? I became a libertarian not because I love that vision, but because I love the results. Most government programs create more harm in the mid to long run than then any benefits they provide to the society at large.
Milton Friedman had a 10-part PBS television show called “Free to Choose” (https://www.freetochoosenetwork.org/programs/free_to_choose/index_80.php). I don’t know who the modern-day Milton Friedman’s are. Friedman could write deeply technical economic content, but he could also talk in everyday language to non-economist normal people. I started watching and listening to your content, as you also have the ability to reach non-economist normal people.
I wish there were more broadly consumed non-“progressive” content. Many colleges are teaching nonsense, and the lack of economic curiosity results in people like Mamdani convincing people that his vision can actually help them.