Zohran Mamdani’s Socialism Flunks Basic Economics
Bureaucracy and Regulation,
Democracy,
Socialism
11/30/2025
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Mises Wire
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Lucas Peters
Socialism always sells itself on empathy. New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s agenda—“free” public transit, frozen rents, and government-mandated equality—sounds merciful on the surface. But it rests on a fatal delusion: that force can manufacture fairness and that wealth can be ordered into existence.
The economists and moral philosophers of the Austrian School—Henry Hazlitt, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Tom Woods, Robert Murphy, and Ron Paul—proved that liberty and prosperity emerge only from voluntary exchange. Every government distortion of prices or property replaces the choices of millions with the dictates of a few.
Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom nailed it: what planners label “coordination” is simply a handful of officials overriding the spontaneous order of countless individuals acting freely. Mises showed socialism’s collapse is not merely logistical—it is ethical. Erase ownership, and you erase accountability. Hazlitt revealed that every “gift” paid with someone else’s work hides unseen damage. Together, these thinkers demonstrated that central planning can never equal the dispersed wisdom of free people making choices for themselves.
What Mamdani calls progress is, under Austrian logic, a recycled failure—ideas that the twentieth century already tested, broke, and discarded.
The Seen vs. the Unseen
https://mises.org/mises-wire/zohran-mamdanis-socialism-flunks-basic-economics
