Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, became the Democrat nominee for mayor of New York with endorsements from self-proclaimed democrat socialists Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Why is democratic socialism still popular? It destroyed every economy in South America over the last century and therefore is a major cause of the tsunami of immigrants from the south. The latest disasters are Venezuela and Bolivia. Chile recovered from its infatuation with democratic socialism in the 1970s and has been the only Latin country with a growing standard of living since. Recently, Argentina grew tired of the destruction caused by democrat socialism and elected a libertarian president to turn the country around. Europe's economy stagnated a generation ago because of democratic socialist policies. So why do people still cling to such nonsense?
Zohran's father, Mahmood Mamdani, is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology, political science and African studies at Columbia University and serves as the chancellor of Kampala International University in Uganda. His mother, Mira Nair, taught film at Columbia when Mamdani was young.
Academics like Mamdani's parents are socialists because they are consumed with envy. That's why about 90% of professors are socialists, especially those in political science, the social sciences and humanities, such as film. Being intelligent, the wealth of business people they consider inferior should be theirs. Instead, they earn meager salaries. And being highly intelligent, they over estimate what they can control. They think they can use their intelligence to design a better world than what capitalism has created. History has proven them wrong for 150 years. But they think they can succeed where others have consistently failed.
As Hayek explained, young people like Mamdani have little experience. They want the world to operate like the family they grew up in. The whole world should be one happy family with the government being the father and providing for everyone equally. Of course, a good father knows everyone in a family and so can provide for them without spoiling them. As the children grow, the father can add more responsibilities because he knows his children intimately.
But family socialism doesn't scale to the national level in which few people know each other. Dealing with strangers is very different than with family members. Capitalist principles applied to a family would destroy it and history has proven that applying socialist family principles to a nation destroys the nation.
Another reason young people love socialism is their ignorance of economics. Most think that one person can grow rich only by taking from others, which causes of poverty. The economy, they assume, is like a game of poker in which the winner impoverishes the losers. That was true of economies until the advent of capitalism. Before, the honorable means to gain wealth was through looting in war, kidnapping the nobility for ransom, taking bribes as a government official, and extortive taxes. Capitalism abolished those means of gaining wealth, leaving commerce as the main path to riches. The only way to make money in commerce is to create new wealth by providing a service that others want to pay for. That's why the West is 30 times richer than it was in 1800.
In its early days, socialists promised to create a new human nature. They imagined that people are born good and turn bad only because of oppression. The government could perfect humanity by abolishing oppression, the most egregious being property. By World War II, it became obvious that they had failed. So, socialists proclaimed they could make nations wealthier than capitalism had. The most popular economist in the U.S. in 1989 wrote in his best selling economics textbook that the Soviet Union would soon grow richer and more powerful than the U.S. The CIA over estimated the GDP of the U.S.S.R by a factor of ten. Three years later the Soviet Union had collapsed along with socialism in Eastern Europe. Since then, socialists have used climate change, claims of racism and appeals to envy to promote socialism.
Envy makes inequality of wealth or income the greatest evil. Democratic socialists claim they aren't consumed by envy; they want to help the poor. Clearly that's a lie, because democratic socialism has always impoverished the poor. And if they really cared about the poor, they would give their own money to help them as capitalists do.
Theologians considered envy to be the most devastating of the seven deadly sins until the 20th century. The rise of socialism turned envy into a virtue. It's a compliment today to tell someone you envy something about them, such as their car. But envy is listed many times in the Bible as an evil.
Envy empowers socialism. Coupled with ignorance, it's disastrous, as every country that has tried democratic socialism can testify.
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