The cold cruelty behind Mamdanis smug democratic socialist mask

If city government destroys your business, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and local Democratic Socialists of America honcho Gustavo Gordillo want you to know you had it coming.Asked back in April about how his subsidized city-owned grocery stores might harm local businesses, Mamdani smirked, “I look forward to the competition.May the most affordable grocery store win.”Gordillo just echoed this sentiment on Fox News, pontificating, “If one publicly owned store is enough to put someone out of business, then maybe they shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place.”This garbage is typical of people with no experience of private industry, nor even much sense of how government works — such as where taxes come from.Let’s be clear: Using tax dollars generated by private businesses — the only source of public revenue — to undercut private business isn’t “competition:” It’s sabotage, an active war on the people by the government they elected.The DSA haters are just as smug when they sneer about mom-and-pop property owners who can’t square the rising costs of energy, insurance, taxes and other city mandates with a rent freeze.“Landlords in New York have been making a 12% return on their investment,” asserts Gordillo, but he’s citing an analysis of all properties with any rent-stabilized units that found a 12.1% rise in Net Operating Income — which isn’t any measure of “return on investment” or even profitability: It excludes such crucial expenses as taxes, capital outlays and interest on debt.Building owners aren’t demanding excessive returns; they just want a fair shot at keeping up with costs.By talking of “competition,” Mamdani and Gordillo use the language of free markets and the “invisible hand” to rationalize using the very visible hand of government to bankrupt businesspeople, give more power to politicians and ultimately reduce human freedom.

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