Category: socialism and Marxism

Bill Maher on how socialism is tainting the Democratic party

November 18, 2025 • 9:41 am

This week’s comedy-and-news segment of Bill Maher’s “Real Time” explains why the creeping socialism of Democrats is good—but for Republicans. who wil exploit it to the max in attack ads. (We now have a socialist mayor of both NYC and Seattle.)  Maher quotes Virginia’s new Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger, saying that “If the party doesn’t shift to the center, we will get fucking torn apart.” Maher argues that the new approbation for socialism by Democrats comes from their failure to get what they want under a capitalist system but, as he notes, the alternative is worse: “socialism doesn’t work.”

Well, of course the U.S. is already partly socialist: we have social security and Medicare, food stamps, and other government help for various groups (Maher describes some of these these). What he’s talking about is the dramatic extension of socialism proposed by people like Mamdani: free bus rides, free childcare, city-run grocery stores, and the like. To show the inimical effects of socialism, Maher uses as examples countries like North Korea, but that is “socialist” only in an extreme sense: it’s really a dictatorship in which a few get all the good stuff and most of the population goes without. But he’s right in general, as we can see what happened when Eastern Europe was under the thumb of the Soviet Union. (Malgorzata used to tell me about queuing up for hours to get a loaf of bread.) The Democratic Socialists of America, for example, call for completely open borders, defunded police, and other policies that would taint the Democrats in an election.

Some clips of the last DSA convention, showing a request for “jazz hands” instead of clapping, as well as for not wearing “aggressive” scents, tell the tale. The DSA is simply too woke for the American people, and it’s best if Democrats separate themselves from this group. Sadly, they’re pushing back on criticisms that they move towards the center, and, says Maher, that will be our undoing.  He’s right.

Mamdani’s unworkable proposal for NYC-owned grocery stores

July 27, 2025 • 9:45 am

Democrat Zohran Mamdani is likely to be the next mayor of NYC, as he proffered a number of campaign promises that delighted progressives young and old. (This is besides his pro-Palestinian stand on the Gaza war, which is irrelevant to his actions as NYC mayor but still delighted the benighted.)

Here are a few of those promises taken from a June 25 article in the NYT:

Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani set himself apart early despite his lack of name recognition.

He did it largely by connecting with younger voters, producing sleek, engaging campaign ads on social media and beating the drum about the need to make life in New York more affordable. This narrow focus on a single, salient issue drove Mr. Mamdani’s campaign, which his main rival, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, described as “highly impactful” as he conceded the race on Tuesday night.

In his victory speech, Mr. Mamdani hammered home his message one last time, attributing his success to New Yorkers who had voted for “a city where they can do more than just struggle.”

I’ve lumped the promises under bold headers, but what’s indented comes from the NYT:

1.) Cheap, city-owned grocery stores funded (like other stuff) by increases in corporate taxes.

One of his ideas to tackle rising costs was to create a city-owned grocery store in each borough. The stores would operate on city-owned land or in city buildings, buy food wholesale and be exempt from property taxes, which would keep the cost of their offerings down, he said.

Experts say the logistics of such a plan are complex, but similar initiatives are already in place in other parts of the United States. Municipalities in Kansas and Wisconsin have operated similar models since 2020 and 2024, and Chicago and Atlanta are working on their own versions.

To fund his affordability initiatives, Mr. Mamdani plans to raise the corporate tax rate to 11.5 percent, which he says will create an additional $5 billion in revenue. He also plans to charge the wealthiest 1 percent of New Yorkers a flat 2 percent tax.

2.) Free city buses (and other transportation improvement).

Among Mr. Mamdani’s most distinctive campaign promises is his vow to make city buses free. As a state legislator, Mr. Mamdani worked with Gov. Kathy Hochul to start a pilot program offering free fares on five bus routes for a limited period. (He later sought to expand the program, but the pilot was not renewed.)

3.) Rent freezes.

In outlining his vision for the city, Mr. Mamdani identified the high cost of housing as the leading reason that residents had left New York in recent years. His main campaign promise was to freeze rents for nearly one million New Yorkers via his appointments to the Rent Guidelines Board, which decides on rent increases for stabilized apartments.

He promised to triple the number of available affordable housing units, with 200,000 new homes to be built over the next decade. Mr. Mamdani also said he would double the amount of money the city currently spends to preserve public housing.

4.) Barring ICE (immigration and customs enforcement) from city facilities.

On his campaign website, Mr. Mamdani pledged to bar Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from city facilities while increasing legal support for immigrants being targeted and protecting their personal data.

5.) Free child care.

The rising cost of child care is among the most pressing issues for parents in New York City. Mr. Mamdani has promised to make free child care available for children between six weeks and five years old and to deliver “baby baskets” to new parents that would include educational resources and necessities like diapers, baby wipes and swaddles.

6.) Replacing some police services (Mamdani originally pledged to defund the police but then backed away on that:

Mr. Mamdani has proposed creating a Department of Community Safety, separate from the Police Department, to respond to people having mental health crises, and to expand violence interrupter programs. In April, he told The Times that the new department would free up “police resources to increase clearance rates for major crimes.”

7.)  Criticizing Israel and promoting Palestine (which is irrelevant, as I said, to running NYC:

Mr. Mamdani has accused the Israeli government of committing apartheid and genocide in Gaza. His criticism of the Israeli government and its treatment of Palestinians came under fire during the campaign, as did his support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement.

In a podcast interview with The Bulwark days before the primary, Mr. Mamdani declined to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” a phrase that Palestinians and their supporters see as a rallying cry for liberation, but that many Jews consider inherently threatening.

Note that Mamdani says he will order Netanyahu arrested if he sets foot in NYC, though that scenario ain’t gonna happen.

Now these promises all sound good and generous, but all of them have problems.  Barring ICE from city facilities may be illegal, rent control could drive up other rents in the city by huge amounts, free buses and child care could help bankrupt the city or reduce transportation options, and a rise in corporate taxes could drive businesses from the city. Not one of these promises has been free of criticism, and not just by Republicans. It’s one thing to offer people pie in the sky, and another to bring that pie down to earth. While I hope these things are possible, I don’t expect that more than one or two of them can actually be met.

In fact, a contributing NYT opinion writer has outlined some of the problems with one of Mamdani’s promises: city-owned grocery stores. (The two store programs outlined above are in small cities lacking any grocery stores, and one of the two hasn’t even come into being yet, as it’s just a proposal). The author of the piece below is is Nicole Gelinas. Yes, she’s a conservative, but you should hear her out, as I haven’t seen anybody say these city-owned stores would ameliorate any problem.

Click the headline to read, or find it archived here

Gelinas’s words are indented:

Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s fresh Democratic nominee for mayor, devotes 126 words and a 43-second TikTok on his website to a signature proposal: “city-owned grocery stores.” This brevity might imply that function will follow form, that the idea is so self-evidently sensible that little needs to be said about it.

What this self-assurance shows, though, is that Mr. Mamdani knows nothing about the grocery business, raising broader questions about the practicality of an assertive socialist agenda like his.

He claims that “a network of city-owned grocery stores” would offer cheaper food and dry goods because it would avoid paying rent or property taxes, “buy and sell at wholesale prices” and “centralize warehousing and distribution.” These assertions collapse upon the slightest scrutiny.

Here are the problems with the proposal (again NYT stuff is indented)

a.) There’s no space for such stores. 

New York City’s government does not have a secret stash of large, empty, retail-ready ground-floor spaces conveniently located along major pedestrian and transit corridors. Indeed, the city regularly rents real estate, including retail-style space, from private owners.

b.) The city government likely lacks the ability to buy groceries at lower wholesale prices compared to regular stores.

As for city-owned grocery stores’ ability to “buy and sell at wholesale prices” and “centralize warehouse and distribution,” the supermarket industry is an intensely intricate business.

“Product doesn’t magically appear on store shelves,” says Ron Margulis, who long covered the industry as a journalist and who hails from a family of supermarket operators. “There is a science that’s applied to making sure the product sent to the shelf is actually going to be purchased, and that science costs money.”

The price a store or chain pays depends on a number of factors, from size and efficiency — volume discounts — to location to an understanding of the complex supply chain.

Whether Mr. Mamdani will have one supermarket in each of the five boroughs, as he originally proposed, or more, as implied by the imprecise term “network,” the city probably will not be able to get wholesale prices as low as far larger and more efficient supermarket chains.

c.) Some distributors would not sell to nonprofit stores:

Moreover, some major New York supermarket operators cooperatively own grocery distributors that buy products from manufacturers and share income with the members. They would not allow a nonprofit public entity to join these networks. As for the city creating its own centralized distribution and bulk purchaser, John Catsimatidis, the Republican billionaire who owns the Gristedes and D’Agostino chains, says such an investment would make sense only if the city operated at least 100 stores.

d.) Mamdani hasn’t shown that the city can bet already-existing stores with their razor-thin profit margins. Anybody who’s looked knows that the profit margin of grocery stores is only about 2%.

Other pesky details intrude on Mr. Mamdani’s plan. Wholesalers offer stores lower prices if they participate in promotions, with in-store coupons and prominent placement. To take advantage of such offers, the city would have to be a marketer of branded products — often, less healthy, higher-margin products.

The reward for successfully navigating the science of stocking shelves is an average 2 percent profit for grocery retailers, Mr. Margulis notes. Mr. Mamdani has made no compelling case that the city could engage in such superior negotiation and cost-cutting techniques to overcome this margin and provide less expensive products. This prospect is especially uncertain because the city-owned stores would probably face higher labor costs, including government-scale pension and health benefits.

e.) Who decides what to sell in these stores?

Once Mr. Mamdani has addressed these issues, he and his top staff members would have to confront another question: What products to sell in the stores? His idea of partnering with “local neighborhoods on products and sourcing” may sound straightforward. But are community board members going to argue over whether to stock Pringles or Lay’s potato chips? Should a city-owned store even sell sugary soda? Should vegetarians who are morally opposed to killing animals be forced to subsidize other New Yorkers’ steak purchases? And while it would be virtuous for the city to focus on selling fresh produce, retailers need to stock high-margin snacks and processed foods to subsidize fresh produce, meat and fish, which carry lower profit margins.

. . .And if city stores would be selling fresh produce for no profit, they would be competing with 1,000 low-priced street vendors, many of them immigrants, who operate carts under a program the Bloomberg administration began.

In his TikTok, Mr. Mamdani pledges to work with “nearby farms.” But as the city’s green markets demonstrate, high-quality food from regional sources is expensive, even absent profits for a third-party retailer.

The problem is that Mamdani is riding on a wave of socialist sentiment promoted by the likes of Bernie Sanders and AOC, who appeal to the benighted young folk.

But don’t get me wrong, there are aspects of American society that should be at least partly socialist, including Social Security, Medicaid, free school lunches for the poor, and, especially, free medical care for Americans who can’t afford it.

But there are those who spend their whole lives carping about capitalism, saying that we shouldn’t allow people to be billionaires, etc., and yet most of those people spend their lives taking advantage of the benefits of American capitalism.  (I expect you can name one such person pretty quickly.) If Mamdani can get those grocery stores built, funded, and selling healthy food, more power to him. But his entire socialistic program simply isn’t going to work, and I think he’ll find that out pretty quickly. As for the free buses and child care and so on, well, those pies are still up there in the stratosphere.

Marxist prof demands an end to grading, a meritocratic ranking that props up a rotten capitalism

August 8, 2019 • 12:00 pm

At hand we have a passionate editorial in Truthout, a left-wing site, written by Richard D. Wolff, described by Wikipedia as ” an American Marxian economist, known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of Paris I (Sorbonne), and The Brecht Forum in New York City.”

Click on the screenshot to read his lucubrations.

Now four days ago I wrote about Bret Stephens’s thesis that a lot of the student unrest on American campuses comes as a revolt against the meritocracy, which, claims Stephens, is inimical to a “radical egalitarianism” that to many is the basis for social justice. In his piece, Wolff argues that grading is not only an unwanted part of a capitalistic meritocracy, and is inimical to education itself, but is also used to buttress capitalism, keeping people ordered and in their place.

I will let you read his argument for yourself. My own take on grading is that it’s imperfect, slotting students into one of five to a dozen categories, but it’s not useless. (In my grad courses, where I wasn’t required to give grades, everyone got a “pass”—a “P”—unless they required a grade, in which case I gave them a written assignment (my grad courses were all discussion and reading courses).  As I recall, some colleges (Reed College may be one of them) don’t give grades, but provide written evaluations for each student. That would be ideal, though it seems hard for grad schools or employers to use such evaluations since there’s nothing to compare.  And that brings up the issue of what grades are for.

Wolff sees grades as of no benefit to students, but only to employers or graduate schools. He’s largely right, I think, though grades are also a way of self-evaluation, letting you know that you’re not performing up to snuff. A lot of students in elite colleges haven’t ever had to compete with a huge number of equally talented students, and a low grade may be a sign that you’re not working hard enough.

Yes, grades are imperfect evaluations, but I see no alternative to some form of evaluation. But I reject the idea that they’re deliberately used to prop up capitalism, a system that, says Wolff, is rotten to the core, and almost would collapse without grades and the attendant meritocracy they foster. For example:

The capitalist economic system has major failures. It generates extreme, socially divisive inequalities of wealth and income. It consistently fails to achieve full employment. Many of its jobs are boring, dangerous and/or mind-numbing. Every four to seven years, it suffers a mysterious downdraft in which millions of people lose jobs and incomes, businesses collapse, falling tax revenues undermine public services, and so on. If these failures were widely perceived as the inherent failures of the capitalist system, the desirability and thus sustainability of capitalism itself might vanish.

How, then, has capitalism survived? Its persistence can best be explained in terms of ideology. The system produces and disseminates interpretations of its failures that blame these problems not on capitalism itself, but on other altogether different “causes.” Institutions have developed mechanisms to anchor such interpretations widely and deeply in the popular consciousness.

One key example is the concept of “meritocracy.” Schools are a key institution that teaches and practices meritocracy via the mechanism of grading.

Presumably Wolff wants a purely socialistic state, but those have always failed, largely because there’s a lack of incentive. Mixed systems, such as those in Scandinavia and, in fact, in much of Europe, are more successful. Even the U.S., with its Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment benefits, is a bit socialistic. But Wolff doesn’t seem to favor that system.

Wolff also raises other problems with grades besides their use as a prop of a failing capitalism. They take excessive time for professors (but not as much time as written evaluations!); a low grade could be the fault of a poor teacher rather than a poor student; grading could measure memorization rather than learning; and students could have not a wrong understanding, but a different understanding. In fact, Wolff shades a bit into postmodernism when he says stuff like this:

Did the student understand the material differently from me in ways not reducible to matters of right and wrong? After all, every piece of verbal or written material is subject to perfectly reasonable multiple interpretations. Education is not well served by insisting on one answer as right and alternatives as wrong. Such insistence is more like indoctrination than education; it undermines creative, critical thinking.

Let a hundred truths blossom! Sometimes, at least in science, one answer is right, and so you can use multiple-choice questions. (I almost never used them; even in large classes I tried to give mostly short essay questions involving “thought.”

What bothers me most about Wolff’s article is that he seems completely opposed to even the idea of a meritocracy. He suggests that any ranking of people is inimical to the socialist society he wants. Yet how can you hire anybody, or achieve excellence, unless you have a way of ranking people? Granted, you can modify a pure meritocracy by adopting other goals (“diversity and inclusion” is the main one in universities), but no college will accept students without some way to rank them. What kind of society can we have if we can’t evaluate people’s skills relative to each other? Yet it seems that’s what Wolff wants:

Within the framework of meritocratic ideology, employers seek to hire the “best” employee and are willing to pay such individual workers more than they pay workers with “less” merit (ranked lower on some scale of productivity). In meritocratic logic, those offered no jobs can only blame themselves: They must assume they have too little merit. Workers learn in school to seek to accumulate merit and achieve higher rankings along the scales that count for employers. Coalitions of educators and employers have inserted the educational system into this merit system as an important place to acquire and accumulate merit that employers will recognize and reward. Better jobs and rising pay reward rising merit acquired through more education as well as “on-the-job” training.

. . . Meritocracy and the educational system’s key place within it are important because capitalism’s survival depends on them. The merit system organizes how individual employees interpret the unemployment they suffer, the job they hate, the wage or salary they find so insufficient, the creativity their job stifles, and so on. It starts as schools train individuals to accept the grades assigned to them as measures of individual academic merit. That prepares them to accept their jobs and incomes as, likewise, measures of their individual productive merit. Under this framework, unequal grades, jobs and income can all be seen as appropriate and fair: Rewards are supposedly proportional to one’s individual merit.

. . . Meritocracy redirects the blame for capitalism’s failures onto its victims. Schools teach meritocracy, and grading is the method.

But I ask the sweating professor: “What is the alternative?” Do we not rank people at all? And if you want that, what are the implications for society?

Here’s the man himself:

Richard D. Wolff