Rent is too high. Groceries cost too much. Sitting behind George Washington’s desk at City Hall this month, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said all of that out loud. He wasn’t wrong about any of it.
He was wrong about what to do next.
That’s the argument voters will have to settle this November. Not whether the country has problems. It does. The question is whether the answer is more freedom or more government control. Mamdani picked a side. His allies will carry that case into races from Long Island to Los Angeles.
The grievances are real. Grocery bills bite. So does rent. But Mamdani takes the pain and points to a solution set where the government, not you, decides where you live, what you’re paid, what your business can charge, and how your groceries get to the shelf. That’s not a side-effect of the agenda. It’s the point. On his first day in office, he said so: “I was elected as a democratic socialist, and I will govern as a democratic socialist. I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical.”
Ask him what “democratic socialism” means, and he’ll tell you. Pressed to define it, he pointed to Martin Luther King: “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, there must be a better distribution of wealth.” On victory night, he closed by quoting Eugene Debs, the socialist who ran for president from a federal prison cell. He’s since polished the language, but the policy hasn’t moved.
Look at the record.
Rent. In June, the Rent Guidelines Board he stacked voted 7-1 to freeze rents on roughly a million stabilized apartments. His standard for that board, from a January 2025 campaign video: “Only those who understand that landlords are doing just fine.” Rent control never lowers rent. It lowers supply. Freeze the price, and landlords stop building, stop maintaining, and eventually stop renting.
Groceries. Five city-owned grocery stores, one per borough. A store that pays no rent, no taxes, and doesn’t have to turn a profit can price anything under the market. Then the market catches up. Below-cost pricing means one of three things: rationing, empty shelves, or lines around the block. Ask anyone who lived through the 1970s gas lines. Ask anyone in Caracas today. Prices carry information. Suppress the price, and shortages fill the gap.
Wages and taxes. A $30 minimum wage by 2030. Corporate tax to 11.5%. A flat 2% on New Yorkers earning above $1 million.
You can debate any of it on the merits. What you can’t do is call it anything other than what it is: the government deciding, on your behalf, what a fair price is, what a fair wage is, and what a fair return looks like. Kill the incentive to build, produce, or hire, and there will be less of all three. That isn’t a case of good ideas poorly executed. It’s a philosophy that fails by design, not execution.
The Declaration of Independence begins with the individual. People hold rights that government did not grant and cannot take. Government comes second, to secure those rights, legitimate only by the consent of the governed. Individual first, government second. Mamdani read that document and heard a call to run it in reverse. Outcomes first, freedom second. Control dressed up as liberation.
He’s entitled to that reading. He’s the mayor of the largest city in America because a majority of New Yorkers agreed with it. But the country isn’t New York. And the country hasn’t voted yet.
This November, voters in dozens of races will pick between two answers to the same problems families face at the kitchen table. One says the government should freeze the rent, run the store, set the wage, and cap the profit. The other trusts free people to solve those problems. Same problems. Opposite solutions. One manages people. The other trusts them.
I’M A DEMOCRAT. SOCIALISTS NEED TO STOP LEECHING OFF MY PARTY AND BUILD THEIR OWN
On July 9, 1776, George Washington ordered the Declaration read aloud to his troops within range of British guns. He didn’t tell them what America meant. He let them hear what it said and decide whether it was worth fighting for.
That’s still the right way. Read the founding document for yourself. Take the pledge at a250Declaration.com. Then decide which answer to the country’s real problems you actually believe in.
Katelyn Bledsoe is spokeswoman and vice president of external affairs at Americans for Prosperity.