Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham is the former publisher of Forbes who writes about leadership and culture.
Tuesday, 4 November 2025
Edison bulbs hung low over the reclaimed-wood table at a popular Brooklyn hangout. A chalkboard listed the Yuletide Farm-to-Table Specials: Roast Chicken with Rosemary ($31), Charred Brussels Sprouts ($14), Winter Ale Braise ($29). Twelve people in Christmas sweaters were packed along the benches. One wore a green turtleneck printed with Santas in yoga poses – a limited-release Ralph Lauren that had sold out at $178.
This was the brunch wing of the socialist revolution.
Above the bar, the television was tuned to NY1. At 11:17 p.m., the banner changed: MAMDANI WINS BY LANDSLIDE – NYC ELECTS DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST MAYOR.
Someone pointed. The group turned. “Fifty-eight percent. That’s a blowout.” Another replied: “Maybe now somebody will stop treating housing like Bitcoin.”
They raised their glasses. A woman in a red sweater said she was tired of seeing her students sleep on couches. A man from a public hospital said his colleagues commuted two hours each way. During the campaign, they had listened carefully to Zohran Kwame Mamdani, 34, son of Ugandan-Indian academics. They liked what they heard.
Near the kitchen, the owner stood with a towel over his shoulder. He was in his 50s, compactly built like his immigrant ancestors, with a bookkeeper’s habit of doing math in his head. He knew exactly how much he paid in rent, wages, insurance, utilities, and sales tax. He knew how thin the margin was between staying open and closing the door.
He did not join the toast. He watched the vote total rise and tried to imagine next year’s spreadsheet.
Across the borough, at the old Eastern Parkway Armory, Mamdani walked onto a plywood stage in a navy suit, subway workers in orange vests behind him, nurses in scrubs in front. “New York chose a different future tonight,” he said. “Housing is a human right. We will build or acquire 500,000 permanently affordable homes. Rents will be frozen city-wide on January first and rolled back 10 per cent every year until they meet 30 per cent of median income. Childcare, CUNY, and the subway will be free by 2028.”
There were no anecdotes, no appeals to destiny. For the people on the floor, that was the point.
What Mamdani was promising was a different answer to a question as old as commerce: who decides the price of things? New York had let those answers emerge from private bargaining. Mamdani wanted them set deliberately. That does not make him a bad person, nor his voters dumb. But it raises a question: do they have any idea what they’re talking about?
What sounded like an I Love NY anthem was an oldie sung around another dining table, at a different time, in London.
In 1864, Karl Marx sat in his Kentish Town study, tracing railway stock prices with a fingertip, asking Friedrich Engels for £120 to speculate on the market. Think about that for a moment.
Marx was 46. His beard had begun to go grey. The carbuncles on his neck, aggravated by stress and bad diet, were almost permanent. His letters from this period are full of complaints about creditors and visits from the landlord.
“The panic of last spring is completely over,” he said to Engels, pointing at the railway columns. “London and North-Western is up four and a half points. The Bank of England has lowered its discount rate. We should buy now.”
Engels listened, amused. He had heard this before. In 1851, Marx had written asking for £30, saying he could “make a killing” on railway shares. In 1870, three years after the first volume of Capital appeared, he confessed: “I have been speculating – partly in American funds, but mainly in English stocks. The profits are enough to protect my family from the disasters of bourgeois society.”
Engels wrote the cheque. The bets rarely worked. The support from Manchester continued anyway.
The man whose name would become synonymous with abolishing capitalism spent considerable energy trying to profit from it. Marx believed capitalism presented three problems: exploitation, alienation, and insecurity. His solution was for workers to control the means of production. Planning would replace markets.
The experiment was conducted on a global scale. The results are recorded in mass graves.
Political scientist R J Rummel places the toll at 110 million victims between 1900 and 1987. The Soviet Union accounts for 62 million, with Stalin personally responsible for 43 million. Communist China follows with 39 million under Mao. Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge killed two million – a quarter of the population – in four years.
Most died not from war but from starvation engineered by policy. The Great Leap Forward, Mao’s crash industrialization from 1958 to 1962, caused tens of millions of famine deaths. The Holodomor – Stalin’s engineered famine in Ukraine – killed millions more through deliberate grain seizures. Forced labor killed the rest. The Gulag processed tens of millions who died in transit, in the camps, and in the frozen construction projects they were compelled to build.
The defenders of these regimes promised equality. What emerged was a new aristocracy. The Soviet nomenklatura – the party elite – numbered three million by the 1980s, less than 1.5 per cent of the population. Their official salaries were modest. But money was beside the point. They received lavish meals delivered free of charge – delicacies ordinary citizens could only dream of. They had exclusive restaurants, apartments chosen by Stalin himself, Black Sea resorts, chauffeur-driven cars. While ordinary citizens stood in bread lines, the nomenklatura shopped in separate stores stocked with Western imports. Access was called “the trough.”
Yugoslav dissident Milovan Đilas called them the “new class.” His book got him imprisoned. Here is the deepest irony of Mamdani’s victory: in the society he admires, his election could never have occurred. Soviet ballots featured one candidate. The system Mamdani’s ideology implies would never permit a Mamdani to be mayor of its greatest city.
In the late 1960s, sociologist Robert Merton coined “the Matthew effect” to describe a pattern: well-known researchers received more credit than equally capable but lesser-known peers. Success piled on success. Advantage compounds. Merton took the phrase from Matthew 25:29: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Out of context, it sounds harsh – a cheer for privilege. Today we say: “the rich get richer.”
But that reading misses the point.
The actual story is of a master who gives three servants different sums to invest. The first two double their money. The third, afraid of losing what little he has, buries his in the ground. When the master returns, he praises the first two and rewards them further. The third is reprimanded – not because he started with less, but because he did nothing with what he had. His money is given to the one who doubled his fortune. Hence: the rich do get richer.
But look closer and ask why? This isn’t a story about privilege. It’s an economic lesson about initiative. Those who use what they’re given acquire more. Those who bury their potential lose even that. Markets work the same way. People who start restaurants, develop technologies, or take calculated risks can, if they succeed, do more of it. Those who never attempt anything beyond the minimum see their opportunities shrink. A failing restaurant tells you what diners want. An empty building tells you about demand. A bankrupt firm tells you about misjudgment. There is cruelty here, but also information.
Socialist schemes interrupt this process. They focus entirely on demand – who gets what – while ignoring supply: who makes it, and why they would bother. When prices are fixed, you can no longer tell which ideas are working. Which leads to more failure. And eventually, bread lines.
Through December, the Brooklyn eatery stayed busy. Office parties came on Thursdays. Couples booked the two-tops by the window on Saturdays. The millennials who had toasted Mamdani returned with friends. The rent freeze took effect January 1. The landlord could no longer raise the lease. But insurance premiums rose anyway. So did property taxes. Produce, labor, utilities – none of it went down.
By April, the owner was spending evenings alone, going over numbers with a pencil. Revenue had softened. Fixed costs had ticked up. Rent was frozen, but the other parts of the equation were not. On the first Monday of May, he put a sign in the window: CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS. He gave his employees their last pay envelopes, turned in the keys, and moved to a smaller apartment in Queens.
The millennials passed the empty storefront a month later, on their way to another place with reclaimed wood and Edison bulbs. One stopped and frowned at the dark window.
“I liked that spot,” she said. “What happened?”
Someone shrugged. “Landlord probably got greedy.”
They kept walking.
This article was originally published by RealClearBooks and made available via RealClearWire.
