Democrat party leaders have stepped up to defend criminals, drug gangs, and to celebrate violence and murder; it is not just a matter of necessity, but worthy of praise. Their marketing arm, doing business as the Press and entertainment industry, elevates and amplifies their message to normalize crime and violence, even for its victims. And it makes perfect sense. Their new normal is bookended by an economic malaise out of which crime becomes a necessity for anyone who desires to rise above or out of the welfare state.
An interesting contrast is their drive toward communism, labeled as socialism, disguised as democratic socialism, which is whitewash or brownwash for you anti-racists, for a captured political class that commands and controls the economy for the purpose of deciding what gets made and who gets it.
Economic systems ration scarce resources, goods, and services, and each one does this through either a private or a social decision-making process, but only individuals can truly make decisions. Modern money economies operate on prices which reflect the value assigned by either individuals or groups, as well as supply and demand. However, who gets to decide what is supplied and what is demanded differs across these systems. Socialism claims that shared ownership will foster broader participation, leading to everyone sharing in the benefits. Although this is impossible, it remains the foundational argument.
With socialism or communism, there is no shared wealth because the system disregards the principles of markets and human nature in favor of a class of elites who make all the decisions, including how well they live at the expense of everyone else. A small group with all the guns, the levers of power, and a police state, because the one thing they do seem to understand about people is they won’t like it once it has been forced upon them. And absent the incentive to benefit from the investment of your effort, it declines precipitously. Future progress is only possible with brines (graft), at the end of a gun, or both.
[Y]ou can redistribute existing wealth, but not necessarily the capacity to create wealth. Sowell also references a case study in Detroit, where policy and regulatory changes led to the departure of a significant portion of the city’s skilled population. Despite the factories, machines, and infrastructure being left behind, those who remained lacked the know-how to operate or maintain them effectively. As a result, the inherited wealth deteriorated. Sowell’s conclusion is clear: confiscated wealth eventually wears out, and those who inherit it without the capacity to use or sustain it will struggle to preserve it, let alone grow it. This is because redistributive efforts deter future innovation by signaling to potential wealth creators that they may not be allowed to retain the fruits of their labor.
From Bernie to AOC to Zohran Mamdani, progressive cult members, quite often, the guilty rich, who have so far been able to weather the local political deterioration of natural rights and the free market, or people made poor by those policies, are most susceptible. The promise is a lie, but New York City is poised to sink even deeper into a hole that will swallow up the lower and middle classes, driving whatever wealth remains within reach to more distant lands.
But it isn’t exactly a commitment. They will bilk New York state if they can, to backstop the failure, or America itself if there is an administration in office willing to force that burden upon the rest of us. But failure is imminent.
Under Mamdani, the City that never sleeps will deteriorate into poverty, crime, and violence—those who can will flee (and take their knowledge, skill, and whatever wealth they can with them). If this is what New York Democrats vote for, they should be required to suffer the consequences until they learn the lesson.
It works for the few in power, some number of boot-licking sycophants and apparatchiks, whoever it can bribe or intimidate into serving it well enough to achieve something above subsistence living, and no one else.
