The Terrible Power Of ‘If’

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. I hope you got more sleep than I did. Anyway, here we are, with Hallowe’en and Guy Fawkes Day comfortably behind us, it’s time to proceed to the really urgent questions of our time, such as this one:

What if Mamdani’s social experiment actually turns out to be a success?

— Sarah Luna (@sarah_luna_1111) November 6, 2025

     I think the lady who asked that question did so to gauge the astonished outrage in the reactions. Apparently, she wasn’t disappointed. But the question itself is worth thinking about, for a very simple albeit troubling reason:

Any Sociopolitical System Will Work
If Enough Of Those Subjected To It
Accept And Believe In It.

     ...with the murmured codicil:

...For Certain Values Of “Work.”

     Those who find the above confusing should read the title of this tirade a few dozen times.

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     Some words have more power than others. “If” is one such. In Godel Escher Bach, Douglas Hofstadter called it “the push into fantasy,” and it is so. What follows “if” can be as bizarre and outrageous as you please, else why would we use it?

     Sarah Luna’s innocent-looking question compels us to probe for what “success” – just another way of saying “would work” – would mean to a socialist regime. For we know all the following, from both theory and history:

• Socialism is economically inefficient.
• It requires coercion to bring it about.
• The great majority endure a lower standard of living than under capitalism.
• The ruling elite acquire wealth and power unavailable to anyone else.
• That creates emigration pressure, which must be quelled by force.
• It also encourages military expansionism.

     All that having been said, a socialist system can be said to “work” if the overwhelming majority of those subjected to it voluntarily accept its constraints and conditions. That requires the elevation of socialism to a moral precept: i.e., that any other sociopolitical system is morally wrong.

     By any other standard, socialism is a failure. Only if those subjected to it accept it as a moral code – a faith — can it be stabilized.

     The great Gregory Benford summarized this problem in his novel Against Infinity:

     “The Marxists thought that under socialism, alienation and class warfare would stop. They ignored the fact that the dialectical model of change never predicted an end to contradictions, or to evolution. Socialism requires a bureaucracy, and that means an administrative class. The administrators faced a problem Marxism never discussed: how well socialism works, versus capitalism. What is the good of being exactly equal to everybody else, if that means you have to be poor? The last century has taught us—or rather, Earth—that socialism is less efficient than capitalism at producing goods.”

     In other words, if the standard is an unquestionable moral precept that “capitalism is wrong and socialism is right,” socialism “succeeds.”

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     Mamdani’s vision of a socialist New York City has only that one chance of survival: persuading the overwhelming majority of Big Apple residents that the conditions he seeks to impose upon them are morally mandatory. Is that even thinkable, in the city that’s been the commercial and financial hub of the world for a century – the city that’s been called “the capital of capitalism?”

     It doesn’t seem likely, but stranger things have happened. Perhaps all the “diehard capitalists” will “emigrate” to friendlier cities and states. Perhaps the remaining residents will accept the much lower standard of living socialism provides as the price for being “right” while the rest of us are “wrong.” It’s just a moral stricture, qualitatively the same as Christianity’s requirement that married men remain faithful to their wives.

     But it’s not likely. Big Apple residents are accustomed to high wages and affluence. Mamdani will face pressure to raise revenues without raising taxes appreciably. He’ll appeal to the state government, and possibly the federal government, for aid. And it’s not entirely impossible that he’ll get it. Remember the Great Default of 1975 under Mayor Abraham Beame?

     Concerning the possibility of a fiscal collapse, Manhattan Institute fellow E. J. McMahon comments:

     Could New York City ever go broke again? The answer is no—or at least, not in the same way as it did in the 1970s, because of financial guardrails set up by the reforms of that era. The prosperity that lifted New York out of virtual bankruptcy, however, also seeded new versions of the political impulses that gave rise to the crisis in the first place. The elected officials who nowadays dominate city hall and Albany exude a sense of fiscal entitlement and economic invulnerability, an aversion to any suggestion of limits on government ambitions, strikingly reminiscent of the Wagner and Lindsay eras. The city’s sprawling network of tax-subsidized nonprofits—a political force that didn’t exist a half-century ago—lobbies relentlessly for higher spending while serving as an organizational network for progressive activists and politicians. Nearly one-quarter of New York’s private-sector employment—twice the share of 30 years ago—is now concentrated in the publicly subsidized health-care and social-assistance sector, which accounts for all the city’s post-pandemic job growth. The municipal labor unions are as powerful as ever, if not more so.
     In short, New York City is poised for another epic fiscal fall. A moderately severe recession is all it would take to push it over the edge. This time, the climb back to fiscal stability could be considerably more difficult.

     Those “political impulses” have come to fruition with the election of socialist Zohran Mamdani.