Mamdani sells socialism — and Republicans peddle the Temu version



New York City has elected a self-professed socialist as mayor. Critics worry about Zohran Mamdani’s inexperience, his approach to law and order, and his views on Israel and Islamic radicalism. But the most urgent issue inside the walls of City Hall is his economic agenda.

Mamdani promises “free” bus transit, a freeze on rent increases, a $30 minimum wage, government-run grocery stores, free child care, and higher taxes in a city already crushed by some of the nation’s highest tax burdens. His brand of socialism isn’t subtle. It’s explicit — and guaranteed to fail.

A movement confident in free enterprise can beat socialism — first in the arena of ideas, then at the ballot box. But only if we choose clarity over imitation.

Many on the right treat Mamdani’s victory as cosmic justice for a deep-blue city that keeps moving left. Others welcome his rise, convinced that showcasing a hard-left mayor will repel voters nationwide. That might be true. It might also be fantasy.

New Yorkers didn’t elect Mamdani so conservatives could score a talking point. His win advances ideas — and conservatives must decide whether they still believe ours are better.

When the right copies the left

Mocking government-run grocery stores is easy. Yet national Republicans just embraced government ownership in Intel — a massive corporation that dwarfs any Manhattan supermarket. Some even support a federal sovereign wealth fund to buy equity across private industry, handing Washington the power to pick winners.

Mamdani demonizes Wall Street and high earners who keep the city solvent. Republicans respond by demonizing “big pharma” and pushing policies that treat major U.S. innovators as villains.

Mamdani wants to redistribute income with New York’s already-extreme tax code. Some on the right now call for $2,000 government checks to lower-income households — financed with borrowed money and paid back by business owners already hit with $350 billion in new tariff taxes this year.

Mamdani would freeze rents because, in his telling, landlords “make a killing.” His economics ignore taxes, insurance, utilities, and maintenance costs that devour margins across New York’s rental market. Yet GOP proposals on health care routinely blame insurers for “making a killing while the little guy suffers.” The overlap with left-wing rhetoric isn’t coincidence. It’s drift.

High grocery prices fuel Mamdani’s push for government-run grocery stores. He blames “capitalistic greed.” Republicans answered high beef prices by accusing meat companies of “price fixing.” Again, the same logic — just delivered with a different logo.

Resurrecting failed policies

Mamdani’s worldview mirrors the same interventionist thinking that powered the Affordable Care Act. Subsidies, mandates, and price controls promised relief. They delivered higher premiums, higher costs, and lower-quality care.

Conservatives should highlight that failure. Instead, too many mimic the left’s solutions — regulation dressed up as populism, government expansion sold as “tough on corporations,” and class warfare renamed as “standing up for workers.”

If Mamdani’s win teaches anything, it’s that conservatives must draw a bright line: free enterprise or the road to socialism. Blurring that line weakens the argument and cedes the moral ground socialism feeds on.

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The real fight

The conservative movement faces serious internal debates — debates worth having. But Mamdani’s election exposes one fight we cannot dodge: the fight for limited government and competitive markets.

We cannot counter socialism with lighter versions of the same policies. We cannot attack Mamdani’s economic program while pushing our own price controls, government takeovers, and redistribution schemes. A movement that refuses to defend free enterprise won’t defeat socialism. It won’t even understand the threat.

Mamdani comes into office with plenty of flaws. New Yorkers will feel the consequences soon enough. But conservatives face a choice: defend our own principles or mimic the left and call it “the new right.”

A movement confident in free enterprise can beat socialism — first in the arena of ideas, then at the ballot box. But only if we choose clarity over imitation.

Global elites think you’re too stupid for soda and beer



The latest wheeze from global public health elites? Jack up taxes on tobacco, alcohol, sugary drinks, and processed food by 50% to raise $3.7 trillion in new revenue. They call it “health policy.” In plain English, it’s government-sanctioned theft.

This isn’t about curing disease. It’s about expanding state power. These so-called health taxes, pushed by academic ideologues and international bureaucrats, are little more than economic punishment disguised as progress. They won’t meaningfully reduce illness, but they’ll absolutely hit working people the hardest.

Sin taxes don’t foster well-being — they weaponize economic pain against the people who can least afford it.

The new push for massive taxes on soda, smokes, beer, and snacks is social engineering with a hefty price tag. The goal isn’t better health so much as behavioral compliance. And who pays for it? Not corporations. Not policymakers. Regular people. Especially those already stretched thin.

The promise of $3.7 trillion in new revenue tells you everything you need to know. This is about cash, not caring. You’re not going to fix the obesity crisis by making a Coke cost $4. You’re just making life worse for the guy who wants a cold drink after work.

These aren’t just products. They’re small pleasures — a beer at dinner, a smoke on break, a soda on a hot afternoon. Legal, affordable, familiar. Stripping them from people’s lives in the name of “health” doesn’t uplift anyone. It makes life more miserable.

And this plan doesn’t educate or empower. It punishes. It uses taxes to bludgeon people into compliance. That’s not public health — that’s moral authoritarianism.

Proponents claim that higher prices discourage consumption, especially among young people. But that’s not smart policy — it’s an admission that the entire strategy relies on pricing people out of their own choices.

That’s not a sign of sound policy; it’s a confession that the aim is to price people out of their own choices. It’s hard not to see this as profoundly elitist. A worldview in which an ignorant public must be nudged, coerced, and taxed into making decisions deemed acceptable by a distant class of arrogant policymakers.

Sin taxes don’t foster well-being — they weaponize economic pain against the people who can least afford it. The more someone spends on a drink or a cigarette, the less they can spend on rent, groceries, or gas. In the U.K., economists found that sin taxes cost low-income families up to 10 times more than they cost the wealthy. That holds true in the United States as well. These are regressive by design.

History offers a warning. Prohibition didn’t end drinking — it empowered criminals. Today, in places like Australia, black markets for vapes and other restricted products are booming. When governments overregulate, people continue to consume. They just go underground, and quality, safety, and accountability go with them.

Public health bureaucrats love to talk about the “commercial determinants of health,” blaming industry for every social ill. But they ignore the personal determinants that matter even more: freedom, dignity, and the right to make informed decisions.

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People already know the risks of smoking, drinking, and sugar consumption. They’ve seen the labels and heard the warnings for years. They don’t need lectures from bureaucrats, government ministers, or international agencies. What they need is respect — and the freedom to live as they choose.

These new tax schemes don’t offer support or alternatives. They rely on coercion, not persuasion. The state becomes the enforcer, not the helper. It’s a government model that punishes pleasure and equates restriction with virtue.

The sinister core of this health tax agenda lies in its relentless condescension. It assumes people are too stupid, too reckless, or too addicted to choose what’s best for themselves, and so government must intervene forcefully and repeatedly.

This is control, not compassionate governance.

A better path exists — one rooted in harm reduction, not prohibition. Encourage low-sugar drink options. Expand access to safer nicotine alternatives. Support moderate alcohol consumption. Respect the people you’re trying to help.

If public health advocates truly want to improve outcomes, they should abandon these regressive, punitive proposals. They should promote innovation, not punishment. Education, not enforcement.

Because real public health doesn’t treat people like problems to be managed. It treats them like citizens — free to live, choose, and thrive.

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You’re now angrier at the poor people chasing a lie than the people who created the fable for them to believe in.

Watch: Mark Levin educates Marxist Democrats on basic economics



The left desperately needs a lesson in economics, and Mark Levin is here to supply it — because Marxists like Robert Reich are failing to do the job.

Reich claims that the “crises” Republicans are concerned about are “totally made up” in order to “distract from the real crises facing Americans” like “growing concentration of wealth” and the “worsening climate crisis.”

“I’m tired of this Marxist claptrap with class warfare,” Levin says, before destroying Reich’s argument.

“According to the Marxists,” he begins, “there’s only one pie. And the more somebody takes out of that pie, the less pie you have to eat. That’s not how market capitalism works.”

“Under capitalism,” he continues, “the pie gets bigger and bigger and bigger except when these masterminds Bernie Sanders, Biden, Reich jump in. And they try and decide who will and who will not succeed.”

This is precisely why the attack on entire industries like automobiles — by “Democratic socialists” like Biden — is going to hurt the economy more than help it.

“The more the government rules over the economy, the harder it is for the economy to grow. And sometimes it begins to shrink,” Levin explains.

Leftists also seem to operate under the belief that there is no middle class in this country.

“We have a massive middle class in this country. Why? Because the government dictated it? No. Because the Industrial Revolution,” Levin says, noting that the Industrial Revolution “was the greatest period of economic growth mankind has ever experienced.”

“Ever since, the Marxists, the Democrats, have done everything they can to it. They hate capitalism,” he adds.


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Levin: 'Why is it that the Democrats never think of ways to expand liberty?'

Tuesday on the radio, LevinTV host Mark Levin explained why instead of shutting down the Democratic presidential campaign talking points, such as single-payer health care and reparations, the American people should simply let Democrats try to defend them.

Levin read a piece from National Review, which showed that while 81 percent of Democrats say it is important that the Democratic nominee supports Medicare for All, 78 percent of Democratic voters do not support the provision at the heart of Medicare for All: the abolishing of private insurance, which Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been promoting.

"People don't support abolishing private health care," Levin said. "They want prices to come down; they want more options; and only the private sector — really only competition — can provide that. Not a government-run private system, which is kind of what we have today. So the Democrats should be forced to eat their proposals. The Democrats want to run on reparations? Let them run on reparations! But first let them explain it."

Listen:

Levin added that we should also let the Democratic presidential nominees talk about the cost of the programs they say they will implement and how the increased federal income taxes will hurt the middle class and the poor the most.

"Now they want a federal wealth tax on your real estate," Levin said. "Do you know why there's no federal property tax? Because it's not in the Constitution. So how're they going to get federal wealth tax? If you own a private business, you're now going to have towns and states telling you what your minimum wage is. You're going to have health care for all that you're going to have to pay for; it'll be a monumental cost. You're going to have to pay for family leave, another monumental cost. And then on top of that, the federal government's going to come in and say, 'Uh, wealth tax.' Why is it that the Democrats never think of ways to expand liberty and opportunity and creativity and productivity? Instead, they're always trying to choke the golden goose. And they think they'll choke the golden goose and yet the golden goose will continue to lay golden eggs. It doesn't work that way."

"They use this Marxist class warfare to get what they want. None of these people with these proposals have ever created jobs in the private sector. None of them have had to meet payrolls. None of them have paid salaries. None of them have paid pensions. None of them have paid medical care for their folks and so forth. They haven't invented a thing. They haven't produced a thing. They're politicians."

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Levin: Why can’t socialists seem to answer this one simple question?

Friday on the radio, LevinTV host Mark Levin broke down one of the biggest problems with communism and socialism, which are essentially based on class warfare.

Specifically, how in the world can anyone properly define which class is supposed to rise up, subjugate the one above them, and become the new privileged class in the first place?

And while the definition problem is a significant one, Levin explains, it’s only the beginning their problems.

Listen:

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