Mamdani’s economic warfare

New York Mayor Mamdani continues to wage a war against American independence.

The latest salvo? Bodegas. New York City has 13,000 or more of these mom-and-pop grocery stores. Unlike chain grocery stores with large parking lots in the suburbs, bodegas are small-scale, neighborhood retailers.

Mamdani’s plan to introduce massive government-run box stores could cripple businesses and raise prices by killing off bodegas. According to the Wall Street Journal, one of those grocery mega-marts would open where five bodegas already operate within a two-block radius—and taxpayers would be funding this economic devastation.

Another attack on American independence is Mamdani’s on-and-off threats this spring to raise property taxes by as much as 9.5%. As The New York Times and others have reported, this may have been a shakedown racket to get the state government in Albany to subsidize New York City’s massive debt. Mamdani could claim credit for balancing the budget by getting taxpayers outside New York City to fund his socialist dreams for the city.

At the heart of Mamdani’s war against American independence is an assault on private property.

New York City Councilwoman Vickie Palladino provides a thoughtful analysis of this phenomenon for Tablet Magazine. She writes that the first step is to “weaponize” the city’s Department of Buildings and “begin writing as many violations against landlords as possible in order to bolster the city’s efforts to justify a seizure” of the property.

Then, “The seized properties will be transferred to ideological and financial allies.” This is called the “7A Process,” which “allows a housing judge to potentially appoint a nonprofit to take over the management of a troubled building.”

A nonprofit? Imagine a situation where the mayor of your city hires professional activists as part-time canvassers to go through neighborhoods and look for ways to seize private property under the guise of landlord neglect. This is a tactic of Mamdani’s “Block by Block” and “Bad Landlord” campaigns. Then, using legal mechanisms to seize the property due to health and safety violations, the mayor hands it off to a so-called “nonprofit” to manage. Palladino writes, “These would undoubtedly be Mamdani’s ideological allies on the far Left.”

This would be a huge transfer of resources away from owners and into the hands of activists. Indeed, Palladino argues that the equity from the seized property could then be leveraged to fund war chests for other anti-private property, anti-business, and political campaigns. The amount of money they could call on from New York City’s seized property assets would be staggering.

American independence is rooted, in part, in limited government and equal opportunities for citizens to own property, make their own financial decisions, innovate, and take risks without the overwhelming power of the administrative state.

The opposite is happening in New York City, and we’ve seen it happen in Seattle, Minneapolis, and elsewhere.

This is ideological warfare, and it pits radical elites against the little guy. No one represents the American dream better than the mom-and-pop bodega rooted in a local neighborhood. Bodega owners know what it means to provide excellent customer service, pay employees, manage changing prices and conditions, and face all the challenges and thrills of independent, honest business.

This is what is at stake as the Mamdani regime continues to wage a war against American freedom and free enterprise. And the fact that the mayor is targeting small businesses with extinction just adds to insult and injury. This is about much more than bodegas and local businesses. This is really about economic warfare in the name of Democratic Socialism.