What the Hell Has New York Turned Into?

As a lifelong New Yorker and CPA with over fifty years watching policy destroy incentives and common sense, I’m flabbergasted by the June 23 Democratic primaries. Our once-great metropolis has truly fallen. Three Mamdani-backed Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates swept key races, including congressional primaries. Voters in these districts either lost their moral compass or failed to grasp how counterproductive their choices were to their own interests and their children’s futures. I’d love to sit with some of them and ask what on earth they were thinking when they backed candidates who openly espouse positions that attack core Western values, individual rights, and the economic realities that make lives better.

These DSA socialists promise “solutions” that are guaranteed to make problems worse:

• Rent caps and rent freezes reduce landlords’ willingness to maintain or upgrade properties and kneecap new construction, shrinking supply and driving existing rents higher through scarcity. When landlords cannot recover costs, they skip improvements. This often results in pulling units off the market, as they cannot charge sufficient rents to recover the cost of the improvements. History proves that rent controls destroy real estate markets, raise rents long-term (being forced to pull units off the market reduces supply while demand remains the same), and devastate property values. As the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck famously asserted “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”

• Government takeover of rental property via massive new public housing and community land trusts leads to disrepair and decay because there’s no market discipline or personal stake in keeping buildings livable, while funding limitations and wasteful spending driven by political considerations assure failure. The city already owns a large number of properties because rent controls have made them so unprofitable that the city had to take them over for nonpayment of taxes. And since the city also lacks the money and incentive to make investments, these properties are horribly neglected themselves.

• Confiscatory taxation to fund expansive entitlements treats productive citizens as milk cows and accelerates the flight of businesses and families already fleeing high taxes and regulation. History proves what should be obvious: high earners invest in businesses and assets that provide jobs and economic growth for all. Targeting these high earners with punitive taxation is therefore a detriment to job creation and economic growth for everyone.

• Education monopoly is controlled by teachers unions and the political class. Mamdani and his allies return the favor by protecting failing public schools and opposing charter and private options. The statistics are irrefutable: union-controlled public schools produce horrible levels of competency in math and English. In contrast, the charter and private schools they fight deliver far better results for kids.

• Anti-Israel extremism and grievance politics signal deeper moral confusion. It is the height of immorality that when Hezbollah attacks, Israel responds, and Israel is portrayed as the bad guy.

New Yorkers who voted for these candidates acted directly against their own interests and those of their children and grandchildren. Decades of one-party rule, failing schools, and normalized economic illiteracy produced voters unable to see that socialism doesn’t work—it just gives bureaucrats and politicians more power over your life and wallet, as it has failed everywhere it’s been tried. Taxpayers and families deserve better than these experiments in economic punishment and cultural division. People are already packing up for greener pastures, and the exodus will only accelerate. The principles of individual liberty, property rights, limited government, and personal responsibility remain the only foundation for real opportunity and progress.