“Terrifying Words”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani claims that Ronald Reagan was wrong to say that the “9 most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help’,” because “9 more terrifying words are actually ‘I worked all day and can’t feed my family.’”
IN FACT, the government policies that Mamdani says will help and feed people have impoverished and starved them, and the capitalism that Mamdani rejects has enriched and fed them. Here are the specifics:
- Copying the defining economic policies of the Soviet Union, Mamdani has called for government to seize the means of production, abolish private health insurance, nationalize the medical supply chain, take over the housing market, and create a network of government-owned grocery stores that won’t “pay rent or property taxes,” thus driving out private supermarkets with average profit margins of just 1% to 3%.
- Per the academic serial work Quality of Life in the Soviet Union, the “living standard” there “was roughly one third that of the United States.”
- Documenting the intrinsic flaws of socialism, the prolific economist William A. McEachern wrote that the “only place you find free cheese is in a mousetrap,” and it is a “mistake” to only consider the immediate effects of public policies and “ignore the secondary effects” because these “often turn out to be more important than the primary effects.”
- One manifestation of those secondary effects is that government confiscation of private wealth drains it from investments that increase productivity, which is the primary driver of living standards and one of the main reasons why middle- and low-income Americans are richer than their counterparts in every other nation of the world.
- Other manifestations include, but are not limited to, reducing incentives to work, increasing enticements to loaf, and creating wasteful layers of regulations and bureaucracy.
- As explained by the World Bank, “Until the mid-18th century, improvements in living standards worldwide were barely perceptible,” and “most societies were resigned to poverty as an inescapable fact of life.”
- In the mid-18th to early-19th centuries, the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism emerged, and the countries that adopted capitalism saw manifold increases in wealth, while the rest of the world continued its prior pattern of economic stagnation.
- Per a paper in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy by Harvard economics professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, “Despite the clear association of modern capitalism with the richest countries in the world, most of the poorer countries rejected capitalist models until they had tried a number of alternatives. Many of those detours — especially socialism and national socialism — imposed horrific costs on these societies and on others that got in their way.”
- After the bulk of the world adopted capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, the portion of the world’s population living below the World Bank’s extreme poverty line plunged from 44% in 1999 to 9% in 2019, and the portion of the world’s population that was undernourished halved from 19% in 1990 to 9% in 2019.
- In 2020, the decades-long trend of falling global poverty and hunger rates dramatically reversed when governments tried to help people by enacting Covid-19 lockdowns, thus destroying jobs, running up government debts, fueling inflation, increasing food insecurity, and causing multitudes of deaths through missed medical care, depression, substance abuse, anxiety, school closures, and other collateral damages.
- In the three pre-Covid years of Trump’s first term, real median household cash income grew by 10%, as compared to 3% during all of Biden’s presidency, even though Biden inherited a rebounding economy that was growing at an annualized rate of 18% in the 6 months before he took office.
- In the three pre-Covid years of Trump’s first term, real median family wealth rose 3% for whites, 33% for blacks, and 65% for Hispanics, the only period of modern U.S. history in which wealth inequality declined, a primary goal of socialists.
