Should we expect a four-year pitched battle?
I see one brewing between the new communist mayor of New York City and those judges who respect law and the U.S. Constitution.*
Some say that Zohran Mamdani, though on record admitting his goal of seizing the means of production, is technically not a communist. Well, if allowed to fully impose all he wants on New Yorkers, maybe that would amount to going straight to a fascist model of totalitarian governance — bypassing the Maoist-Stalinist stage.
Giving him the benefit of the doubt.
But we do know that Mamdani was quick to hire such advisors as housing czarina Cea Weaver, who has lamented home ownership as a “weapon of white supremacy” and declared property as such to be something regrettably long treated as “an individualized good” that now must be treated as a “collective good.”
If you don’t own your house as an individual and have a spare room (or half a room), and somebody needs a place to live, could a Mamdani-and-Weaver-run Big Apple compel you to give space to a stranger that you don’t want around? If property becomes a “collective good” and all must cuddle in the warm bosom of the state-managed collective, the answer must be: yes.
But New Yorkers may not be quite doomed.
Not, anyway, if there are enough judges like David Jones, who recently interfered with an attempt by the Mamdani administration to interfere in the sale of many rental properties owned by Pinnacle Group.
Mamdani’s office says they’ll keep trying.
Of course they will.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Or the New York State Constitution, for that matter: see §7 (a), which clearly states that “Private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation.”
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One reply on “Who’ll Oppose the Quasi-Commie?”
The constitution of the state of New York contains that §7 (a),and the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution is taken to imposed the same restraint on the constituent states as the Bill of Rights did upon the Federal government, including the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment (“nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”).
But generations of lawyers have been trained to ignore the very meaning of “property”, and to imagine that a person or group of persons have lost no property so long as he, she,or they possess formal title.
(Indeed, by much the same sophistry, many people insist that fascism and National Socialism were not socialism, as these systems left expropriated persons in possession of formal title to objects over which they no longer possessed legal right of control.)
Some in the Mamdani administration are sincere believers in socialism of one sort or of another. But these people are полезные дураки (useful idiots) for a project to bring ruin to the city that has been the financial center for the Western world for the last century. In the modern age, with transactions being overwhelmingly electronic, the effects upon the West and upon its opponents will be mostly one of morale; but just that alone may have very real significance.
A plurality of the voters in New York City will not change their terrible direction until they recognize that their perverse dream cannot be realized; even if the City does not hit rock bottom while Mamdani is mayor, it is headed inexorably in that direction.