In 1982, Ronald Reagan and his Fed chief, Paul Volker, cranked up the. Federal Reserve's prime rate. It induced a recession, as credit tightened up radically. It also did was recessions always do - killed off a lot of bad ideas and unnsound businesses and investments, and freed up capital and labor to focus on better ideas on the other side of the trough.
It was a brutal recession, worse in some ways than the 2008 recession. But like most recessions when the underlying fundamentals are strong, once the ill-advised ideas and bad policies are gotten out of the way, the economy bounced back fast, in this case kicking off a peacetime bull market that lasted until 2007.
The lesson? Provided that the fundamentals of your economy are sound, sometimes a recession is a necessary part of the cycle; like a forest fire kills off dead growth and frees up space for new trees, the recession opens up possibilities and capital.
Speaking of fundamentally sound things saddled with stupid ideas - let's talk about New York City, and its very potential next mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
Some people and sources think it's inevitable:
New York is doomed. It will go full-commie. Zohran Mamdani is now polling higher than the rest of the candidates COMBINED.
— Tara Servatius (@TaraServatius) July 31, 2025
The more New York Democrats find out about his commie past, the more they love him. pic.twitter.com/4SjYqUK4N9
Others are more sanguine - provided Eric Adams and Curt Sliwa get out of the race:
Cuomo polling better than Mamdani? I hope that’s a trend. Mamdani’s politics are un-American, crony-communism shouldn’t prevail. If it does, I’ll have to decide: CT or TX? https://t.co/3ELTgFkuWl
— Peter Sasaki (@PeterSasaki) August 30, 2025
But according to Charles Gasparino, the butt parked in the Mayor's seat is only part of the problem; the social "infrastructure" of clunky, inhuman Marxism, with a thin veneer of humanitarianism smeared on to gull the gullible, the current wave of "progressive" sympathy in New York's institutions and population, will remain long after this next election - and it's got teeth:
Operationally, Andrew Cuomo could be a good mayor.
He knows how to run things on both the state and national level.
Yet consider his ill-fated last years as governor: He was forced to cave to the left on every issue, banned fracking, raised taxes and couldn’t tame the size of government.
Could Eric Adams stand up to those clowns if he were to win — and not drop out as people now believe he will?
He hasn’t so far.
Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, the crime-fighting activist founder of the Guardian Angels, is tough as nails and, when you sit with him, very coherent on policy.
Yet if through a stroke of divine intervention he were to be elected, he would be outnumbered 1,000 to 1.
:And so maybe, just maybe, the answer is to do for the Big Apple what Reagan and Paul Volker did for the economy; let the confluence of arrogane, short-sightedness and stupidity bring about its own inevitable demise.
The fundamentals are there - New York is still the financial hub of the entire world. The human, mental and physical capital is there, just as surely as Mamdani and the mass of white progressives that plan to vote for him and his ruinous proposals are also there.
So what happens when the class supporting Mamdani gets their way, and kneecaps the golden goose?
We may well find out. And maybe that'll be a good thing:
As alarm bells ring over the New York City mayoral race, an odd sentiment is starting to gain traction across the business community: Just give up.
Just sit tight and let the ill-equipped Maoist Zohran Mamdani win in November.
Let him unleash his creepy, dogmatic socialist policies on the masses to teach them valuable lessons — both economic and cultural — about wokeness and progressivism, and more broadly its stranglehold on the Democratic Party.
I’m starting to agree.
Like the 1982 recession, it may be the only way to root out the sickness at the root of NYC's problems - in this case, by exposing New York's misbegotten dominant political class as the toxic influence they are.
