Now some may argue otherwise with this premise. However, a healthy discussion of various aspects of socialism should produce something of value. Discussions of socialism often find themselves discussing Ayn Rand and her views.
What were Rand’s views of socialism? Did she see it as a potentially viable economic system that just needed the right “smart” people to see to its successful execution? Far from it. Rand recognized the moral flaw. Socialism was a system that was rooted in the denial of individual liberty. As such, her warning to free countries was simple. Authoritarianism rarely begins with tanks in the streets. it begins when a society votes away its own individual rights.
Ayn Rand:
“There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism—by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.”
Democracy is not a substitute for individual rights. One of the beauties of American exceptionalism is the idea enshrined in our founding documents that each person is entitled to certain inalienable rights, rights bestowed not by government but by God.
The idea that these rights can be removed via the ballot box is just as immoral as doing so via gunpoint. Voting to surrender your liberty isn’t progress. It is suicide.
The New Intellectual:
“Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases.”
The foundational premise of socialism is that your life, effort, and mind belong to the group. This is essentially slavery. You are owned by the state. Once you accept that the state owns the individual, complete control is no longer a risk—it is the inevitable outcome. It becomes just a question of how long before that condition is achieved. NYC is well on the way under Mamdani.
Mamdani is undermining the housing rental market. His freeze of rents on a significant population of rental housing has caused rents to rise that are outside his purview. This is an entirely predictable result. This will inevitably call for more rental units to be controlled from City Hall. As more units are brought under the thumb of the city, the quality of that rental housing will decline since the owners will be squeezed between rising costs and income that cannot be adjusted to reflect these costs. More regulation from City Hall will inevitably result in the abandonment of properties in a cycle of declining rental housing.
Ayn Rand:
Liberty erodes by degrees. Complete control is rarely established in a single leap. It develops incrementally as state dependence creates market failure, intervention demands regulation, and regulation ultimately hardens into authoritarian command.
Freedom cannot survive in an environment like this. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, when a culture trades personal sovereignty for guaranteed security, it inevitably loses both.
