The current New York mayoral race outcome will inevitably determine a just-in-time or all-too-late wake-up call to prevent Marxist ideology and control obsession from obliterating the vibrant economic and social character of our nation’s largest and arguably most quintessentially multi-cultural city.
The very real existence of such a grim prospect reveals a growing trend of ignorance regarding dastardly dire impacts of this political movement wherever others have naively succumbed to the propaganda.
Unlike America, think of police states of Cuba and Venezuela for example where their reverse migrant problem involves residents desperately attempting to escape and come here.
Don’t be fooled or comforted that Manhattan mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani refers to himself as a "democratic socialist" rather than communist.
Communism's founder Karl Marx regarded the first phase of his idealized utopia as one which would be accomplished only through the abolishment of private property along with state ownership of production means.
While not every socialist is a communist, history shows that every socialist government leads towards communism, becoming increasingly totalitarian in taking control over their subjects' actions, thoughts and communications.
Or as Vladimir Lenin said it more plainly, "The goal of socialism is communism."
Socialism most readily appeals those youth who haven’t studied enough history or haven’t been taught about its true record of death, poverty, and the devaluation of human life.
Shockingly, a recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov found that 62% of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a "favorable view" of socialism, and 34% say the same of communism that led to horrors of Stalin’s policies which killed more than three million people, and China’s Great Leap Forward which killed some 23 million or more.
Nevertheless, socialism has still beguiled leading intellectuals and politicians of the West who continue to hold on to vague fantasies that government bureaucracies can be trusted to make more-informed decisions about the welfare of a people than the people themselves regarding everything including economic inequality among citizens and nations.
While attacking private property and believing with John Maynard Keynes, that "the state is wise and the market is stupid," they ignore a reality that capitalism has produced the greatest alleviation of suffering, the greatest liberation from want and ignorance, greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in history.
In opposition to legacy U.S. market capitalism, the leftist economic model as expressed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engle's "The Communist Manifesto," was government control of a command economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This philosophy, which has failed, poisoned, and impoverished civilizations everywhere it has been tried, and is on an accelerating trajectory to deconstruct our cherished American culture and values from top to bottom; it leaves no sphere of daily life untouched.
For years, America has been on a slow, steady and dangerous path, one that's gradually trading away cherished traditions and freedoms for a system that seeks to claim ownership over all property and repressive control over its subjects on the counterfeit premise that socialism is somehow more compassionate and equitable.
It is neither.
There is no question that Marxist socialism is on the march across America where its ideology has come to pervade all key institutions ranging from universities and schools, to mass media and popular entertainment, to major corporations and medicine, to the arts and sciences, and perhaps even churches.
Now controlled by its far-left socialist leaders, the Democratic Party has fully embraced divisive identitarian and tribalist income redistribution justified by victimhood propaganda coupled with beyond nonsensical "climate equity" dogma, while scorning American unity and social progress.
Now enter stage left self-identified socialist Manhattan mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani who is running on simplistic promises of a $30-an-hour minimum wage, free bus rides, subsidized public no-profit groceries, rent freezes and communal government housing, as well as state ownership of means of economic production.
What could possibly go wrong?!
Well, maybe restaurants, for example, would have to charge more to cover the extra cost of paying those $30 per-hour-servers . . . or maybe replace them altogether with non-union AI robots.
Maybe beleaguered taxpayers would realize that those free bus tickets along with other public welfare were coming out of their shrinking household budgets with no thanks to profligate, unaccountable government spending which must be paid for with massive inflation and debt that will be passed on to future generations.
Or as cogently noted by Margaret Thatcher, "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."
Maybe bankrupt fixed-rent landlords would abandon derelict properties as previously zoned single-family neighborhoods became overtaken by massive faceless human warehousing.
Maybe those government owned and managed grocery markets would be barren of products just as I witnessed while visiting Moscow on numerous occasions in the late 1980s, following the implosion of the Soviet Union.
Soviet state ownership of means of economic production also led to poor-quality products nobody wanted, including antiquated appliances and clothing styles such as overcoats that even the makers wouldn't wear and lousy cars which had no foreign markets.
And those greedy billionaires, the ones that a prospective mayor Mamdani disapproves of?
Maybe they would leave and take a huge chunk of Manhattan’s tax base with them.
America is at a pivotal point of choosing between socialism and the freedoms of a representative federal democracy, one which has made us the most prosperous, generous, strongest, freest and, yes, fairest nation on Earth.
That window of decision is rapidly closing.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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