Why they try communism

What critics call failure, but poverty is the actual goal of commie leaders

Roger Kimball wrote, “Why socialism will fail,” a pretty nifty if overly intellectualized piece that encapsulates the common smug capitalist prediction of doom because “sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”

Hahaha, right?

Really? Well, Congress ran out of other people’s money in the 1980s. We have a national debt approaching $40 trillion—$40 million million. Maybe we’re the socialists but we just won’t admit it.

Kimball wrote of Democrats in New York nominating three more communists to join Bernie and the Squaw Squad in Congress:

For those impervious to the siren call of socialism, its activities in the world seem like the truth according to Hegel, “a bacchanalian whirl in which no member is not drunk.” The sitting New York Democrats that Mamdani’s new squad just defeated are pretty far left. But they are the soul of moderation compared to the newcomers.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, who will be the Democratic candidate for New York’s 13th district, wants to abolish prisons, abolish ICE, abolish borders and defund the police. She thinks “all deportations are wrong” and has called the United States an “effing disgrace.” “I forgot to get napkins,” she wrote online, “so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.”

Claire Valdez (NY-7) and Brad Lander (NY-10) are cut from the same cloth. Grant citizenship and voting rights to illegal aliens? Yep. Seize the property of “bad landlords”? You betcha. Eliminate private health insurance and make taxpayers pony up for all transgender procedures? But of course. Abolish ICE, forgive the $2 trillion of student-loan debt, pack the Supreme Court? Can you doubt it?

A standard option in all current models of socialism is a ferocious anti-Israel sentiment fed, although you are not supposed to notice this, through a noxious current of apparent anti-Semitism. “Israel doesn’t exist,” Chevalier tells her followers, while all three support Hamas and think that Israel’s actions to defend itself in Gaza count as “genocide.”

What will be the upshot or outcome of these political perturbations? The disclaimer found on many financial statements offers a useful reminder: past results are no guarantee of future performance. A persistent gremlin affecting our prognostications is the temptation to extrapolate simply from current trends to future realities. It is easy to discount the presence of countervailing forces.

Kimball does not understand that communism is not about economics. It is about power. Communism is campaign rhetoric stuffed with promises—Free Health Care, Free Buses, Free Rent, Free Grocery Stores—that are emptier than Kamala’s brain.

Communism appeals to vagabonds, vagrants and very lazy people.

Nearly a century ago, in 1928, Harry McClintock wrote the hobo’s dream song The Big Rock Candy Mountains:

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
There's a land that's fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

McClintock knew none of that would happen. So do communists. When they say free rent, they simply mean the government is your landlord. Nothing in life is free and the price paid for communist gifts is your freedom.

Communism works quite well in North Korea. Oh, sure, occasionally people have to eat grass to survive and the average height of a North Korean is 3 inches shorter than his cousin in South Korean, but that is irrelevant. None of that matters.

The purpose of communism is power for the communists. Thus, communism is a success in North Korea because the Kim Dynasty is still in power and this Kim is grooming his daughter to take over when he croaks.

Cuba is so poor that the anti-communist Trump felt sorry for the people and allowed Russia to deliver a tanker of oil to tied them over.

But after 67 years of communism, Cubans are happy as dung beetles in a dung heap because most citizens were born into this failure and they don’t remember the good old days when Cuba had casinos and high-rollers. As we learned in The Godfather II, Castro kicked the Mafia out so they went and created Las Vegas as the replacement Havana.

Islamism is a cousin of communism and Iran is just like Cuba and North Korea.

President Trump ditched regime change because he realized 70 million of the 92 million Iranians were born after the revolution. Misery is the only life they know.

What the three nations share in common is the people rely on the government. When your life is in the hands of the government, whoever controls the government controls you. People don’t care. If they did, they would revolt.

How do I know that I am on the right track? Jonah Goldberg is in the opposite direction writing, “Mamdani Is Ignoring 40 Centuries of Economic Lessons.”

There is a reason he ignores those lessons—communism is not about economics.

Goldberg wrote:

Economists are famous for arguing “on one hand” this and “on the other hand” that. This is why President Truman famously wanted to hire a one-handed economist.

Nonetheless, there are few issues that enjoy a broader consensus among economists than the conclusion that rent control is counterproductive. Surveys of leading economists going back nearly four decades confirm this. A 1990 poll of 464 economists found that 93% of American respondents agreed that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available”—95% of Canadian economists had a similar opinion. And another survey in 2012 had a similar result.

As Jason Furman, who chaired President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, put it, “Rent control has been about as disgraced as any economic policy in the tool kit.” The Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck—a socialist, mind you—was pithier: “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”

In response to the controversy over Mamdani’s rent control scheme, which applies to roughly 1 million of the city’s rent stabilized apartments, progressive writer Jill Filipovic posted on X, “Am I the only person who has no strong feeling about the rent freeze other than ‘cool to try out a policy like this on a short-term basis so we can test if it actually works?’ My only hope is we all learn some important information from this experiment and are honest about the results, whatever it brings.”

Mamdani’s plan is not about controlling rent. Just like gun control, rent control is about control. If the landlords leave, the city will gladly take over maintenance, which will never be done because the worse things get, the more the people will need the government and the more control Mayor for Life Mamdani will have.

Poor people are easier to control.

Communists are mean to their subjects. Mamdani not only shut down escalators like they were the Indian Point Nuclear power station, but he blocked them so people could not use them as stairs.

Romans analyzed political actions by asking cui bono? Who benefits? Certainly not the people but as long as Mamdani benefits, what does he care? He gets the courtside tickets to the Knicks games.