Other People’s Money

We wonder if Zohran Mamdani, New York’s thirty-four-year-old socialist mayor-elect, is familiar with the wit and wisdom of Margaret Thatcher. We know that he has gone to the school of Frantz Fanon, the author of The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and an apologist for violence as a “liberating force,” since Mamdani wrote his senior thesis at Bowdoin College on Fanon and that progenitor of modern revolutionary sentiment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Thatcher, our readers will recall, was the prime minister of Great Britain from 1979 to 1990. She is widely credited as being the individual who, more than any other, rescued the United Kingdom from the economic disaster into which decades of social-democratic acquiescence had plunged the once-prosperous nation. She did this by reinstituting free-market policies, breaking the stranglehold of public-sector unions, and returning many government-run industries to private hands. One of Thatcher’s most famous mots was the observation that “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” The hard school of experience—what the French polymath Laplace referred to as expériences nombreuses et funestes—suggests that Thatcher was correct. Whenever and wherever socialist policies are put into practice, general immiseration follows. And it follows, as Polonius said in another context, as the night the day.

Mamdani has given no evidence that he has taken Thatcher’s bit of practical wisdom on board. Born in Uganda to a wealthy family, he came to America in 1999 so that his father could take up a teaching post at Columbia University. Mamdani père sits in the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department—home to such radical apologists as Rashid Khalidi. The notoriously anti-Western spirit of that redoubt seems to have made a deep impression on Mamdani fils. His victory speech last month made it clear that he sees New York less as a city full of individuals busy pursuing their own interests and livelihoods than as an economic and ethnic battleground in which long-standing class-based grievances are to be redressed. Whatever else it does, Mamdani’s promise to pursue “an agenda that will freeze the rents for more than two million rent-stabilized tenants, make buses fast and free, and deliver universal childcare across our city” will quickly provide an illustration of Thatcher’s point about running out of “other people’s money.” His plan to supplement, even effectively replace, the city’s police department with a new “Department of Community Safety” is another sign of his dour utopian proclivities.