As alarm bells ring over the New York City mayoral race, an odd sentiment is starting to gain traction across the business community: Just give up.
Just sit tight and let the ill-equipped Maoist Zohran Mamdani win in November.
Let him unleash his creepy, dogmatic socialist policies on the masses to teach them valuable lessons — both economic and cultural — about wokeness and progressivism, and more broadly its stranglehold on the Democratic Party.
I’m starting to agree.
A fleeing middle class
Let the city sink into the abyss.
Let Mamdani’s policies force out business and prod more upper- and middle-class residents to flee.
Let the city declare bankruptcy — which will happen if Mamdani gets his way.
We can then start from scratch.
Detroit did it and the last time I was there, its downtown was pristine.
Plus, we’re headed there anyway, right?
Why not expedite the process and teach people who think leftism works that it doesn’t — particularly when you chase out all the non-leftists who pay the bills.
To be clear, New York City isn’t Detroit.
Sure, there’s diversification, businesses moving operations to Texas and Florida, but for all the work-from-home doom-and-gloom talk about New York City real estate, Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan is still headquartered in Midtown.
Goldman Sachs remains on the West Side.
BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, is in Hudson Yards.
NYU Langone is here, built through the grit of legendary financier Ken Langone, with world prestige and a quality of care to match.
(I can personally attest to the latter.)
The best restaurants are here: Try getting a table at Elio’s, Sistina or Rao’s.
It’s still a cultural mecca, the home of Broadway, The Met and some great museums.
For all our issues, New York City with a GDP of around $1.3 trillion has an economy bigger than many countries.
We are also saddled, of course, with an insane political class.
Zohran Mamdani might be honest in his Marxism, maybe boyishly naive in explaining the benefits of government-run grocery stores that have failed everywhere they were tried.
(See most recently Kansas City.)
But in this state, he is no outlier.
He is emblematic of one-party rule, a fellow traveler in New York’s leftist Democratic Party that has brainwashed voters into believing we need massive regulation that impedes business formation.
Ditto for rent control that creates housing shortages, lax policing (do you really feel safe on the streets of Manhattan, particularly at night?), high taxes (the reason so many people are leaving) and a fracking ban that continues to deprive economically depressed upstate regions.
Dems have ditched New York’s melting pot in favor of woke and hostile tribalism.
The largest concentration of Jews outside Israel, right here in New York City, must now accept daily harassment over leftists’ warped interpretation of history.
And we must embrace unions, like the clown car that runs the school system.
Consider: Sleepy Joe Biden’s immigration policies opened the floodgates for millions of migrants to come to this country.
Many settled here in New York City, were housed in fancy hotels, and yet since 2020 NYC has witnessed a net out-migration of around 400,000 people.
Put another way, a city’s worth of taxpayers left and was replaced by the world’s poor who are tapping into the city’s generous welfare state.
Cuomo caved
Operationally, Andrew Cuomo could be a good mayor.
He knows how to run things on both the state and national level.
Yet consider his ill-fated last years as governor: He was forced to cave to the left on every issue, banned fracking, raised taxes and couldn’t tame the size of government.
Could Eric Adams stand up to those clowns if he were to win — and not drop out as people now believe he will?
He hasn’t so far.
Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, the crime-fighting activist founder of the Guardian Angels, is tough as nails and, when you sit with him, very coherent on policy.
Yet if through a stroke of divine intervention he were to be elected, he would be outnumbered 1,000 to 1.
He needs the state Legislature to create reform on taxes and other issues, and that’s where the mini-Mamdanis reside.
There and the New York City Council, which is a mini-politburo.
That’s why I am now leaning toward the nuclear option.
Let Mamdani win — and prove to New Yorkers and Americans once and for all that there’s a reason communism failed in the Soviet Union, and that the apparatchiks in China have embraced the free market to survive.
