New York City is on the verge of electing a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist,” Zohran Mamdani, as mayor. How did so many New Yorkers become so clueless about how the world works?
Some of the blame goes back to Henry David Thoreau, a colicky 19th-century philosopher whose popularity revived with the hippies and leftists in the 1960s.
Since the dawn of the counterculture, colleges have sainted him as a moral visionary.
Thoreau’s 1849 essay on civil disobedience showed a lofty disdain for politicians, but many of his other values risk paving the road to serfdom.
Mamdani and Thoreau share a squirrely sanctimony.
Mamdani has caught hell for pretending to be working class — despite his privileged silver-spoon upbringing.
Thoreau boasted that he took “the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty” during his time living at Walden Pond in 1840s Massachusetts.
But Thoreau’s poverty was a kabuki performance. His cabin was a mere 20-minute stroll from his mother’s dinner table, where he often took repast.
As a testy 2015 New Yorker piece on Thoreau noted, “subsistence living” is “a condition attractive chiefly to those not obliged to endure it.”
Mamdani believes politicians should not permit anyone to be a billionaire.
Thoreau didn’t take a campaign position on billionaires, but he did proclaim: “The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another.”
The primary evidence for the counterbalancing was in the moral dogmas popular among Massachusetts transcendentalists in Thoreau’s time.
Thoreau had brazen contempt for affluence — another trait that fits plenty of contemporary leftist templates.
He bewailed that Americans were being “ruined by luxury and heedless expense” and proclaimed the “only cure” is “in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose.”
At that time, the average house in the United States had about 1,000 square feet and was occupied by 5.5 people, according to the Census Bureau.
Houses had no indoor plumbing, central heating or electricity. Regardless, Thoreau summoned people to repent their shameless self-indulgences.
Nowadays, many environmental zealots have the same contempt for affluence, idolizing the medieval era when humanity respected Mother Nature by having lives that were “nasty, brutish, and short,” as philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote long ago.
Thoreau’s original sin — the same for many leftists nowadays — is his contempt for voluntary exchange among private citizens.
He proclaimed in “Walden” that “trade curses everything it handles.” Thoreau derided “the immorality of trade,” as if society became poorer every time two parties made a mutually profitable agreement.
Except, of course, when Thoreau was the one profiting.
He boasted he grew 7 miles of rows of beans at Walden.
His memoir would have been more candid if he added a postscript to his jeremiad: “Trade is a great evil, and hey, buddy, ya wanna buy some beans?”
Thoreau sold his surplus beans and bought rice, pork, molasses, apples and farming supplies. Do people lose part of their soul when they swap beans for bacon or what?
The alternative to voluntary private exchanges is for officialdom to decree all prices and values.
Zohran Mamdani proposes creating government-run grocery stores because “grocery prices are out of control.”
Hatred of capitalism is the only “evidence” to justify government taking over the food supply.
I recall visiting East Berlin grocery stores in the 1980s. Communist shoppers could purchase any fruit or vegetable they wanted — as long as they only wanted apples, cabbage or potatoes.
Government-run grocery stores in other American cities have been fiascos.
Mamdani favors government ownership of energy resources and touts more subsidies for public transit as practically the panacea for climate change.
Thoreau would have dissented on that score thanks to his visceral hatred of railroads (and much of modern life in the 1800s).
Thoreau mystically proclaimed there is a “universal law, which no man can ever outwit,” that guaranteed it would always be cheaper to walk than to take the train.
Wrong, dude. A day’s wages in the 1840s was roughly the same as the fare for 30 miles rail travel. Nowadays, for $2.90, you can travel 31 miles from 207th Street in Manhattan to Far Rockaway in Queens.
But saving the Earth isn’t included in the fare.
Thoreau famously declared, “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.”
Did Thoreau presume people were “desperate” because they preferred to drink, smoke and boink instead of philosophize like he did?
Similarly, Mamdani recently declared that 75% of New York City residents are “trapped in a state of anxiety.”
And the only hope to make them worry-free is for politicians to seize vastly more power over their daily lives, right?
Letting the mayor dictate that rents never increase could cure anxiety just like the $30-an-hour minimum wage Mamdani favors.
And if those policies utterly wreck the local economy, the victims can grow their own beans like Thoreau did.
If Thoreau was sometimes blinded by his own halo, at least he didn’t directly imperil humanity.
But the same trait prevails among leftist politicians who feel a sacred moral duty to forcibly impose reckless righteous policies.
If Mamdani’s policies ruin legions of New Yorkers, maybe city bureaucrats could create a list of vacant ponds like Walden where refugees can flee.
James Bovard is the author of 11 books, including “Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
