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Comment by arkis22 | Hacker News Reader

Mamdani was largely propelled by disillusionment of the young who then voted for him. They listen to the headline political message and they don't understand the underlying principles, his policies will not make them better off. But he'll try and fail, and then they'll just increasingly think the system is broken. If they read more they would understand that. It's the same thing that propelled Trump into office

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Mamdani ran against Cuomo, a disgraced sex offender, and the incumbent Adams, whose corruption scandal was so bad that Trump pardoned him to sow chaos among the Democratic party. If I were a NYC resident I'd vote for a sack of potatoes over these two.

How someone gets "young people don't read" from this is beyond me.

the fact that the candidates are worse than sacks of potatoes is a separate fact from the enthusiasm that young people have for the socialist candidate. if it were normal they would do what young people normally do, which is to not vote.

Humor me - concisely, what's so blatantly bad and failure prone about hos policies? Self evident enough that had the youngsters "read past the outline" they would have had to have got?

rent control just limits supply. city owned grocery stores is a huge capital and organization outlay just to save 2% margin with a huge opportunity cost. at least he backed down from defunding the police. the socialist democratic organization he belongs to hasnt though

I think you're exaggerating his policies. He's not proposing "rent control", he's saying he won't raise the rent on existing rent-stabilized apartments. To conclude that limits supply assumes that all the extra money would be invested into new construction.

Likewise, he's only proposing a pilot program with five grocery stores, which isn't a huge capital expenditure for a large city.

You literally just described rent control.

That's kind of a joke right? it's a pilot program for 5 grocery stores? he wins votes off something that is something you admit is so inconsequential, while spending political capital to do it instead of other things? 2% margins baby

Those apartments are already under rent control, and they'd be just as rent controlled if he allowed a rent increase. So, if "rent control limits supply", the supply will be limited no matter what he does.

My mistake, I thought you meant financial capital. I disagree. It seems like grocery prices are a real problem in New York, and the existing subsidy program isn't working. Ensuring people can afford food seems like an excellent use use of political capital, and if it works it can be scaled up.

And those groceries stores are seemingly the only solution to urban food deserts where martgins are too thin for grocers to open shop

Man those are not real issues, a 5 grocery store pilot program and a rent freeze (which only applies to less than half of appartments in NYC and less than 30% or total housing in the city)

Not OP, and I'm actually voting for him, but I think a lot of people are critical of the taxes that will be required to fund all his social programs, including:

Raising property taxes while freezing rents (meaning your shitty NYC apt will never be repaired again), $30 min wage and corporate tax increase and 0.1% tax of stock and options trades (driving jobs away)

Can you point me to any major socialist success stories? I was going to ask that rhetorically but i would actually be happy if you could educate me. Certainly running an entire country on socialism almost always ends really badly, but maybe that's not the same on a city level? Or maybe mamdani has discovered the perfect set of policies to make it work.

europe

They kind of abandoned socialism in the 80s and 90s precisely because it's awful. Thatcher pointed out that no other political experiment has been carried on for so long as socialism despite it's spectacular failure. She thoroughly destroyed the socialist system in Britain and probably saved the country. I'm not sure what happened in the rest of europe.

Isn't it interesting that the most capitalist country in the world is also the most successful, while the similarly sized and more socialist leaning eu is lagging behind?

Also there's a difference between economic socialism, and the capitalist liberal democracies that run on some social principles like the eu and uk.

https://youtu.be/1i9FQ834yFc

> Can you point me to any major socialist success stories?

The ongoing Socialist Evolution starting with the migration of pretty much the entire developed world over the middle part of the 20th Century from relatively pure capitalism to modern mixed economies that been a pretty big success story in terms of human welfare, despite some periods of widespread or more local backsliding.

There are a lot of people who voted for Trump who are older and now actively worse off. It’s not just the young who are disillusioned.

Great article in the economist today.

https://archive.is/sx6I2

which of the groups do you think read vs just swallow cable news?

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