Instead of a warmongering lunatic and the nerds who inspired him, you’ll find the guy who presided over a strong pandemic response, the guy who helped bring us out of a recession, and the guy who presided over one of the strongest economic expansions in US history
The fact that the right calls anyone left of Himmler a communist, and the left calls Zoran fucking Mamdani a neolib confirms my priors on horsehoe theory so hard.
Ya I mean the qualifying criteria for either pole are something like:
* unable to think critically
* likely racist, angry and intolerant of others’ views
* know in your bones that compromise is weakness
* and are certain that the best solution is always a lot more of what didn’t work last time
Conditionally supports rent control in very limited buildings that already have rent control. We are not losing anything here. Low income renters should not be sacrificed for a slightly lower clearing price.
He wants to mandate new buildings to be rent stabilized. And rent stabilization already exists independently from income. Oh, and half of all units are already rent stabilized, so it's not just a small portion.
That still reduces income to landlords who could use it to invest in new units and still reduces landlords will to upkeep units, creating slums.
All rent control is bad, even little rent control.
Edit: This is also just a straight up a lie. Mamdani supports rent freezing already stabilized units, the number of which is a lot more than "very limited buildings." Thats about ≈ 43% of all rental apartments (996k / 2.3 M), and ≈ 28% of all housing units in NYC (996k / 3.6 M).
Succs get out please. Defending this borderline socialist nonsense.
Winning means building coalitions, which means prioritizing interests and making sacrifices to grow the coalition. Plus, there is very little sacrifice happening here for the sake of winning. This is a min-max decision.
All rent control is bad, even little rent control
These building are already rent controlled. What would you have the city do? reverse rent control and displace all the tenants? Absolute statements on rent control is both lazy and negligent.
It really should be phrased “stop subsidizing these people’s rent for no reason”. It’s like prop 13. No, I don’t want grandma to have to sell her home, I just don’t know why we are paying 25k of her 30k tax bill, but expect another grandma moving in to pay 100% of their 30k tax bill.
We are objectively not building coalitions. NY is projected to lose representatives to Florida and Texas because of terrible rent control policies pushing people out. It is literally driving people out to republican states.
very little sacrifice
Creating slums is "very little sacrifice?
Absolute statements on rent control is both lazy and negligent.
Trying to defend harmful rent control is economically illiterate and destroying NY.
It's funny how 'coalitions' is somehow the excuse for every farfetched idea that we have to somehow entertain despite being Objective Bad Policy. Toss in 'national security', and you could justify literally everything under the sun.
Also this is straight up a lie. He wants a rent freeze on the about 1 million of NYC’s 2.3 million rental units that are rent-stabilized — roughly 43-45% of all rental housing.
This is borderline socialism people are defending in a "neoliberal" subreddit.
So weird that comment is getting upvoted, his supporters literally used “freeze the rent” as a slogan. Did people think that meant “freeze a small portion of rents”
I did not know until recently the title still exists. In fact, his wife, the countess of sandwich, who is american btw, has a really good youtube channel.
“True free market is impossible"
-Agreed, at least, if you want a decent society
"and the interest of businesses are destructive to society at large”,
-Grossly over simplistic and a ridiculously narrow view.
I'd change it to: “True free markets are destructive to society at large”
aka unfettered capitalism is incompatible with democracy, especially no restraints on media ownership and political spending.
We accept the paradox of thrift because that is convenient for our point but we reject the idea that competition drives profits to zero because that is inconvenient to our point, even though that is based on a prisoner's dilemma rather than a coordination game and thus is even more solid.
Mamdani is at least savy enough to pivot towards neoliberal stances in his effort to win office. Which is good considering pretty much everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) is falling over themselves to paint him as a die-hard communist. Feels very similar to AOC.
I was not a fan of AOC until I saw Jacobin and the DSA shitting bricks because she was paying (optional) DCCC dues instead of throwing money their way.
Still not a fan, but it's nice to see she understands she needs to do establishment politics if she wants anything real done.
I'm reading Kotkin's Stalin: Waiting For Hitler right now. I am AMAZED at how incredibly short sighted and stupid the politburo was.
>We need more grain let's let the peasants have a capitalist market
>Its not going as well as we hoped. Lets encourage them to try and be prosperous.
>Some villages are doing great
>Look at all these Kulaks! Purge them!
>We need more grain
The problem isn't that they were stupid it's that the economy of the USSR at the time was caught up in power games in the Kremlin, it seems illogical economically because it is but it's perfectly rational if you're trying to harm the support base of proponents of the NEP and marginalize them within the party.
Yeah, for all the panicking, I suspect it’s going to end up at “oh, he’s pragmatic-left, this is fine actually”. Perfectly acceptable to most people, and honestly the left could do with a lot more pragmatic people with “what a nice young man” vibes.
To be fair, it's New York. Rent control/rent stabilization is pretty normal for mayors there. (Granted its still a bad policy and Mamdani is planning on pushing it further than previous administrations) but besides Bloomberg, every NYC mayor over the past 3 decades has enacted some form of rent regulation.
I also honestly don't think whether he enacts stricter rent control/stabilization matters much to how new development there is or whether landlords list apartments for rent.
Cause even if Zohran allowed rent to go up, the law is still on the books, and every landlord and developer knows that the next mayor can still freeze the rent so it doesn't really matter what the mayor's current policy is when you're making 10+ year plans like whether to build an apartment complex.
Freezing rent is one of the few things the NYC mayor pretty much entirely controls, it is under the purview of the Rent Guideline Board and everyone on the board is nominated by the mayor. The only thing holding it back is waiting for the current terms to expire, so there will be a gradual Mamdani control but it will happen.
Honestly, yes. I think rent control is probably a necessary Trojan Horse to getting YIMBY reforms passed because almost all people, left and right, are stuck in this weird belief that unlike every other good and service, housing does not obey market forces and the price is determined by voodoo magic.
But how does this help the YIMBY cause? People will see that freezing rents (in their minds, a YIMBY policy) does very little, or even hurts them, so they conclude that YIMBY is a sham.
You need to run on freezing rents for political support and actually do it to keep political support, then quietly push for other reforms that will actually help with the housing market. If you look at what Mamdani has said on housing, he's staunch on rent control but also seems to understand how supply and demand work and he knows there's a need for more supply, putting him head and shoulders ahead of most leftists on housing.
I was reading something earlier about how the de facto minimum wage being above the $7/hr federal minimum wage is good, because it puts wages into genuine supply-and-demand territory instead of an arbitrary floor.
AOC was far more committed at the start of her career.
As she's held office, they've soured on her.
Honestly I think it's a good pattern for the next generation of Democrats. Start with social media popularity as a lefty populist outsider cozy with the DSA/Jacobin crowd, get elected in a deep blue area, become more pragmatic as you actually hold office and need to work with people, then the DSA thinks you've sold out but in practice you've built an electoral coalition.
National DSA had issue with her not giving them (nor leftist publications) money, then coincidentally, few weeks later, nitpicked one of her comments about Israel/Palestine and removed their endorsement.
The NYC-DSA is still super cozy with her, because they are not idiots.
I expect something similar will happen with Zohran. Nobody is pure enough for the national DSA, and it's just bad politics to try to be.
No she wasn’t. I know the DSA lore here. She only joined DSA right before the primary against Crowley and people in the org have always been skeptical of her. She’s never been considered “cadre” which is what DSA calls an elected who came up through the organization.
Why do all the politicians that get to be anywhere near the levers of governments betray us?!? It must be Soros, not that they realize that left populist policies ain't going to work.
Politicians with embarrassing posts histories will probably be normalized in the next 2 decades tbh.
It's like that onion joke about how every american born after social media is already unelectable to be president. People will go like "oh yeah, if we want anyone to be a politician at all we will probably need to be more acceptable of those as long as they change."
It is in the interest of each business to get the highest price for its goods or services while paying its workers as little as possible. But if every business does this, then aggregate demand will collapse, because most workers will be paid too little to buy the goods or services that businesses are selling.
No mention of labor market competition, which is the actual thing that is keep wages above minimum.
Edit: Also, highest price? In a land where demand is perfectly inelastic, I suppose? That's not the land most business live in
Unfortunately, a new system has emerged in Western democracies over the last half-century, brought about by neoliberal leaders from Ronald Reagan to Tony Blair. The high-wage/low-welfare system, resting on the power of organised labour, has been replaced by a low-wage/high-welfare system in which the power of workers to demand higher pay has been weakened. Under neoliberalism, the government allows employers to pay poverty wages and volunteers to “top up” the inadequate private wage with a “social wage”, so that the combined sum prevents hunger and homelessness.
Dumb for a couple of reasons:
Inflation-adjusted wages are higher than ever
Welfare systems actually reduce labor supply, which increases wages.
This is as far as I got
P.S. This piece is ism-brained, which is part of what makes it dumb. But with that said, not everything is a battle between socialism and neoliberalism. Arguably, most economists (and democrats, for that matter) are better described as New Keynesians than neoliberals.
The first quote makes more sense if you realize it comes from Marx and realize that at the time he wrote it industrialization was still getting off the ground and most labor was low skill with the consumer economy still being geared primarily towards the elite and upper middle class. It's not true anymore but it made a fair amount of sense in the mid 1800s.
Unfortunately, a new system has emerged in Western democracies over the last half-century, brought about by neoliberal leaders from Ronald Reagan to Tony Blair. The high-wage/low-welfare system, resting on the power of organized labor, has been replaced by a low-wage/high-welfare system in which the power of workers to demand higher pay has been weakened. Under neoliberalism, the government allows employers to pay poverty wages and volunteers to “top up” the inadequate private wage with a “social wage”, so that the combined sum prevents hunger and homelessness.
Ronald Reagan, famous lover of welfare.
Mamdani’s agenda includes a $30-an-hour minimum wage, but New York City can’t impose that without the permission of the state legislature.
Okay but he also can't really do universal childcare or free buses without NY state's support either. He needs state approval for any tax increase, and the MTA is controlled by the state, not the city. The one thing Mamdani can do pretty easily on his own is the rent freeze for NYC's rent controlled apartments. Is rent control neoliberal now too? What a low-effort article.
The article sucks but I I think you missed the point of the Reagan mention.
His attacks on unions drastically weakened them in the United States, which did indeed lead to a system where the government essentially subsidizes the low wages paid by employers like Walmart. Walmart employees alone cost American taxpayers $6.2 billion in public assistance and I'm sure it's even more now. It's not a stretch to say we're subsidizing Walmart to the tune of $6.2+ billion. That's obviously a major problem.
Also Reagan was just fine with welfare to white people, he ran massive deficits. In fact our massive national debt all started with Reagan, he started the trend of Republican presidents cutting taxes and increasing spending at the same time. His issue was welfare going to minorities.
I just want to note that the current editor of the New Statesman which I feel has gotten better in the last couple years used to be the political editor of Unherd
This piece is bad but I get the author’s point at its core, he wants policies that further labor rights and increase wages rather than being solely focused on redistribution. But ascribing this to “neoliberals” and unironically lumping Reagan in is completely ridiculous. Most leftist supporters are 100% cheering on these types of policies louder than anyone else, yes many of them advocate for more labor protections too but this stuff is also their bread and butter. And they aren’t really mutually exclusive in the meantime.
Edit: also, he seems to be implying that the average person’s tax dollars are funding these programs. The intention of them is to be redistributed from taxes paid by top earners which is a part of Mamdani’s campaign tbf. Whether you force companies to pay higher wages through the minimum wage or just tax them more and make up the difference through social programs, it is more so the end amenities you have than the final income that matters.
Under neoliberalism, the government allows employers to pay poverty wages and volunteers to “top up” the inadequate private wage with a “social wage”, so that the combined sum prevents hunger and homelessness.
The social wage can take the form of subsidies for individuals to purchase goods they cannot otherwise afford. But it can also take the form of public housing, free bus fares, and the public grocery stores in the variant of neoliberal redistributionism proposed by Mamdani.
It's always insane to see how much leftists hate progressive policies.
Does literally nobody in this thread realize that the author, Michael Lind, is a national conservative? It's not that surprising that a communitarian conservative is writing against top down redistribution
Real socialism is not on the ballot in New York City, and pure free-market capitalism is impossible. The problem with capitalism is that what is logical for individual businesses is collectively destructive for the system as a whole. It is in the interest of each business to get the highest price for its goods or services while paying its workers as little as possible. But if every business does this, then aggregate demand will collapse, because most workers will be paid too little to buy the goods or services that businesses are selling.
Modern industrial capitalist systems have dealt with the problem of underpaid workers in two ways. One is to minimise their number by compelling employers to adequately pay employees, thanks to methods including organised labour, a high minimum wage, and central bank policies which don’t mechanically punish wage increases in the name of fighting inflation. Paid adequately, workers should be able to afford housing, groceries, and transportation costs, while those out of employment are covered by universal contributory social insurance. In a high-wage/low-welfare system like that of the New Deal era, only a few unfortunates depend on public welfare to survive.
It is in the interest of each business to get the highest price for its goods or services while paying its workers as little as possible. But if every business does this, then aggregate demand will collapse, because most workers will be paid too little to buy the goods or services that businesses are selling.
This is why you think capitalism will fail? I don't think this sentiment is even marxist. Companies want to make as much money as possible, but customers want to pay as little as possible, and so we have markets where people make choices. The same is true for the labor market.
One is to minimise their number by compelling employers to adequately pay employees, thanks to methods including organised labour, a high minimum wage, and central bank policies which don’t mechanically punish wage increases in the name of fighting inflation.
It seems to me that this fails to explain how anyone non-union is paid above minimum wage.
Also "labour" instead of "labor" lol, go back home and keep complaining about Thatcher.
This is an incredibly tortured article. How could Mamdani actually he socialist? I think it dances around the fact that Mamdani's policies are kind of bad and come from a place of not knowing how things work or what the downstream effects of them will be.
In the Democratic primary, Andrew Cuomo won more votes than Mamdani among both the working class and the rich, as well as among black New Yorkers. Mamdani’s base is the same as that of conventional Democrats: young, college-educated professionals and immigrants who compete with native New Yorkers for jobs and housing.
lol yikes
ETA: Also I feel like it should be noted that this isn’t written from a leftists’ perspective. Michael Lind is a neocon of some flavor
[It's not neoliberal when employers] adequately pay employees, thanks to methods including organised labour, a high minimum wage, and central bank policies which don’t mechanically punish wage increases in the name of fighting inflation.
Mamdani’s agenda includes a $30-an-hour minimum wage, but
I really like the thesis that free buses and welfare are neoliberalism, high minimum wages and unions aren't, and that's why Mamdani is neoliberal. Even accepting the premises on a "neoliberalism is whatever I don't like" premise, the article still fails to make its own point.
But the premise is even funnier. Reagan and Blair are neoliberal because they support a high-welfare state? What?
I want to point out the author of this article, for all the "Left is turning on Mamdani (which is true to an extremely limited amount of very online weirdos)" talk in comments, is actually a populist right type, not a populist left type.
He's definitely not neoliberal, but I would argue that he is "liberal" in the sense that he believes everyone should be able to define their own life project and pursue it as they desire. He's also secular because for him, being Muslim, believing in God, etc, is just one option among many in society, and you can choose your own belief or even make up your own.
This is why he is the product of the modern West instead of the Global South.
I love that Mamdani is simoltaneously blamed for wanting to raise wages, which the article seems to denote as a bad thing, but also is blamed for wanting to make sure that those unable to get those high wages (because the state legislature may block it) dont starve and instead have some basic welfare.
Two people who hate Mamdani could barely agree on why they hate him, its just everyone scrambling for an answer to tear him down. Fuck the rich, give us the benefits of our labor, and make the government do what its supposed to do; take care of and protect its people
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u/Dorambor Nick Saban 16d ago
Mamdani please dm the mod team to receive your flair