OPINION:
Ah, the warm embrace of collectivism. It’s like having the life squeezed out of you by a giant boa constrictor. As Venezuela struggles to get free, the snake is wrapping itself around New York.
New York City Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani and deposed Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro are now neighbors. It’s not that far from the Metropolitan Detention Center, where Mr. Maduro is being held, to Gracie Mansion, his honor’s digs. The mayor should drop in on the once-powerful drug lord for some pointers on how to ruin the lives of the people you control.
In his inaugural address, Mr. Mamdani set forth an ambitious program for turning the Big Apple into a squalid, Third World state, saying he will “replace the frigidity of individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
The “frigidity of individualism” is what transformed the United States from a colonial backwater into the most powerful nation on earth in 250 years. The “warmth of collectivism” created a sea of blood in the 20th century, with tributaries flowing from Soviet gulags, Cambodian Killing Fields and Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.
Mr. Mamdani plans to freeze rents and build 200,000 public housing units at a cost of $100 billion. His just-appointed tenant czar, Cea Weaver, once denounced homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy.” There are also plans for city-owned grocery stores and free child care from 6 weeks to 5 years of age. This will provide a wonderful opportunity for Mr. Mamdani’s minions to indoctrinate the young.
The mayor also intends to raise the hourly minimum wage to $30, more than quadrupling the federal minimum wage. Then all the employees fired from entry-level positions can find rewarding work changing diapers and wiping runny noses at municipal day care centers.
This is an agenda worthy of a 34-year-old man-child from a comfortable professional family who never had a real job.
Mr. Mamdani wants to make the five boroughs look like Venezuela at low tide. After 27 years of red-hot socialism, the South American state has bread lines, rolling blackouts, hyperinflation and police state repression.
Venezuela also has the world’s largest known oil reserves: 300 billion barrels, or somewhere from 17% to 20% of the total. Once, it was one of the richest countries in the world. In 1970, Venezuela generated 1% of global gross domestic product and accounted for 8% of the world’s oil production.
Then Mr. Maduro’s Marxist predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez, came to power. Today, Venezuela has 0.1% of global GDP and has fallen from the world’s top oil producer to its 18th. From 2012 to 2021, Venezuela’s economy shrank 71%, with inflation running as high as 130,000% in 2018. Venezuela’s poverty rate is 91%, with 67% living in extreme poverty.
There are widespread shortages of everything. Supermarket shelves are bare. In Caracas, people rummage through garbage cans for scraps of food. Besides food, the populace lacks medicine, electricity and clean water.
This has led to civil unrest. In the past, riots have been brutally suppressed. Cuban security forces were brought in to train the regime’s goons.
Since the blessings of socialism were bestowed on the once-prosperous nation, one-third of the population — 8 million people — have fled the workers’ paradise. Refugees included the types of people a country can ill afford to lose, including skilled workers.
It was all so predictable.
Since the Castro revolution of 1959, Cuba has also gone from prosperity to extreme poverty. I was there for a week in 1999. I saw drugstores that had one or two bottles on 10-foot-long shelves and a man on a street corner with a card table refilling disposable BIC lighters. People sneaked into fields to pick fruits and vegetables.
The doorman at my hotel told me he was a civil engineer but had a family to feed. He could earn $20 monthly as an engineer or $20 a day in tips in his current job. That is the genius of collectivism: It turns engineers into doormen.
In Havana, people would stop me on the street, knowing only that I was an Americano, and beg me to help them escape the warm embrace of collectivism. Without subsidized oil from Venezuela, Cuba could be the next domino to fall.
Josef Stalin shared Mr. Mamdani’s enthusiasm for the warm embrace of collectivism. The Russian socialist declared, “The individual is nothing. The collective is everything.”
That’s a lesson the Cubans and Venezuelans learned from bitter experience. Now, it’s New Yorkers’ turn.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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