SOCIALISM, DEMOCRACY AND ECONOMICS

The 2025 New York City mayoral election is scheduled to be held on November 4, 2025. Incumbent Eric Adams, who was elected as a Democrat, is seeking reelection to a second term as an independent.

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He is being challenged by Democrat state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, Republican activist Curtis Sliwa, and independent former governor Andrew Cuomo. Zohran Mamdani proclaims himself a “democratic socialist,” which is to say he would like to see democracy deployed to realize socialist economics. However, Jeffrey A. Tucker says that there is no such thing as socialist economics. There is economics and there is socialism, but they do not mix. Nor does socialism mix with democracy over the long term.

The recent mayoral primary for the Democratic Party pitted a discredited lockdown practitioner and former governor against a purveyor of old-style socialist economics in which everything we want comes to us for free. The latter guy won, although he will likely be defeated in the general election by the incumbent who is running as an independent.

The name of the victor is Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old son of a Columbia University professor of anthropology and hence hardly a living representative of the workers and peasants he wants to rise up against ruling-class capitalists. He proclaims himself a “democratic socialist,” which is to say he would like to see democracy deployed to realize socialist economics.

The Socialist Economics

What is socialist economics? In a strict sense, there is no such thing. Economics means the rational allocation of scarce resources to unlimited competing demands. The discipline of economics begins with the key observation that you cannot always get what you want but that the right systems can deliver the maximum amount of what we need.