The Big Apple’s Woes Are Not Just the Result of One Election
05/26/2026
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Mises Wire
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Gregory Bresiger
The destruction of New York is the logic of decades of history and long-forgotten pols addicted to outrageous spending and taxation.
Today’s successors of these big taxers are as myopic as the Bourbon kings who “learned nothing and forgot nothing.”
It didn’t start with the election of socialist/communist Mayor Zorain Mamdani, who followed in their footsteps and said the government should control “the means of production.”
Mamdani is the logical outcome of generations of New York City’s drift toward bigger and bigger government along with destroying the private sector. This leads the most productive citizens and businesses to head for the exits. It’s been going on for generations.
These problems happened as, little by little, the city’s Democrats trended radical left. Even some Republicans moved left. An example of the latter was liberal Republican mayor John Lindsay, elected in 1965 and the author of the city’s first income tax. He later turned Democrat. New York’s popular Republican governor, Nelson “Rocky” Rockefeller—elected four times from the late 1950s to the early 1970s—nearly spent the state into bankruptcy. It was all in the stars. Before winning the statehouse in 1958, a predecessor Republican governor, Thomas Dewey, told a young Rockefeller, “Nelson, I like you but I can’t afford you.” Dewey was prescient.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/big-apples-woes-are-not-just-result-one-election
