The richest cities in America are conducting a live experiment, and the results are coming in faster than the architects of the experiment can spin them. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani spent his first months in office pushing a two-percentage-point income tax hike on millionaires and a corporate tax jump from 7.5 to 11.5 percent.
The reaction was immediate. Citadel CEO Ken Griffin had already moved to Miami. This week, the New York Post reported that Apollo Global Management, a private equity giant headquartered in Manhattan since 1990, is finalizing a “second headquarters” in either Florida or Texas, with up to a thousand jobs expected to migrate south. Wall Street firms have been quietly drawing up exit strategies since the day Mamdani won the primary.
Three thousand miles away, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, who took office the same day as Mamdani, was asked at a Seattle University forum about the wealthy fleeing Washington state over its new 9.9 percent tax on high earners. She laughed. “The ones that leave, like, bye,” she said, waving her hand.
Days later, Starbucks announced it was shifting two thousand jobs and a hundred million dollars in investment from Seattle to Nashville. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz packed up for Miami. Microsoft President Brad Smith said he is more worried about Washington’s business climate than at any point in thirty years.
You are supposed to look at this and conclude that socialism is failing again. That its young architects, fresh out of Oxford and Bowdoin, simply do not understand economics. That with a few tweaks, the next attempt will get it right. This is the lie. Socialism is not failing. It is working exactly as designed. The intentions were never good. They never have been. And the people running the experiment know precisely what they are doing.
The Lie Beneath the Lie
Every defense of socialism, from undergraduate seminars to the New York Times opinion page, rests on a single sentimental claim, that the intentions are noble even when the outcomes are catastrophic. Young people, the argument goes, keep reaching for it because they yearn for justice. The system breaks because flawed humans cannot live up to the dream.
This requires you to believe that every socialist regime in human history was run by amateurs who tried their best and somehow kept stumbling into mass graves. It requires you to believe that the socialist ruling class, in every iteration, was as poor as the people they governed. It requires you to ignore the bank statements.
The truth is simpler and uglier. Socialism has always functioned as a wealth transfer mechanism, and it has always succeeded at that function. The transfer just runs in the opposite direction from the one advertised on the brochure. Money, property, and power flow upward to the political class that administers the system, while the population is pacified with the language of equality and the rhetoric of the common good. The architects are not stupid. They are not naive. They are doing what their ideological ancestors have always done, and they are getting the same results their ancestors got.
Three Regimes, Three Fortunes
Consider Cuba, the country young Americans have romanticized for sixty years on the strength of a beard and a poster. Fidel Castro spent decades lecturing the world about the evils of wealth while quietly amassing one. Forbes estimated his personal fortune at roughly $900 million before his death, accumulated through state-controlled enterprises he treated as personal property. He maintained roughly twenty residences, a private island, and a yacht.
The brother who inherited his country, Raul, ran the military’s commercial empire, which dominates Cuban tourism, retail, and finance to this day. Meanwhile, ordinary Cubans wait in line for rationed bread, smuggle insulin through Miami relatives, and risk drowning on rafts to escape. The Castros did not fail. They built precisely the country they wanted, one in which their family controlled everything and the population controlled nothing.
Then there is Venezuela, which young democratic socialists have spent fifteen years insisting was “not real socialism.” Hugo Chávez nationalized the oil industry, redistributed land, and crushed the merchant class in the name of the people. By the time he died, his daughter Maria Gabriela had reportedly become the wealthiest woman in the country, with foreign bank accounts estimated at over $4 billion.
His successor Nicolás Maduro presides over a regime where his stepsons were caught running cocaine through the presidential hangar, and where the inner circle lives in compounds while ordinary Venezuelans hunt zoo animals for food, lose an average of twenty pounds in what locals call the “Maduro diet,” and bury children who died of preventable malnutrition. The Bolivarian revolution succeeded. It just succeeded for the Bolivarians, not the Venezuelans.
And then North Korea, the purest expression of socialism the modern world has produced. Three generations of the Kim family have ruled a country of starving peasants from palaces stocked with Hennessy, Mercedes limousines, and a personal sushi chef flown in from Tokyo. Kim Jong Un was educated at a Swiss boarding school.
His sister wears Christian Dior. The North Korean elite live in a capital city that resembles a Potemkin metropolis, while the rest of the country eats grass during famines and disappears into political prison camps that satellite imagery has tracked for decades. Three generations. Same family. Same fortunes. Same starving population. This is not a system that has failed to deliver. This is a system that has delivered exactly what its operators designed it to deliver.
The Drunk Driver Distinction
The defenders of Mamdani and Wilson have a clever counter to all this. They will tell you that what they oppose is not capitalism but crony capitalism, the rigged system in which billionaires capture government and write their own rules. And here is where the conservative movement has to be careful, because that complaint is not entirely wrong. Crony capitalism is real, and it is corrosive. But the diagnosis the left builds on top of that complaint is fraudulent.
Crony capitalism is to capitalism what arsonists are to firefighters. Both work with fire. Their purposes are opposite. A real capitalist competes for customers in a market where consumers decide who wins. A crony capitalist competes for politicians in a market where bureaucrats decide who wins. The first requires producing something people want. The second requires capturing something people are forced to fund. They are not variations of one another. They are enemies.
The leftist solution to crony capitalism, more government, is gasoline poured directly onto the fire. Crony capitalism exists because the state has grown large enough and discretionary enough to be purchased. You cannot solve a corruption-of-power problem by concentrating more power in the same hands that were corrupted.
And this is the part that exposes the Mamdani and Wilson agendas for what they actually are. Their policies do not threaten crony capitalism. Their policies are the soil in which crony capitalism grows. When productive firms flee, the firms that remain are the ones with the political connections to negotiate exemptions, secure subsidies, and capture the bidding for whatever the city ends up nationalizing next.
City-owned grocery stores are not a threat to monopolists. They are a contract opportunity for the politically connected supplier who will win the no-bid agreement. Public housing construction bonds do not threaten developers. They threaten the developers who do not have the right donor relationships.
The drunk driver does not represent the freedom of the road. He represents the abuse of it. Pretending otherwise is how the left tries to convict the road itself.
The Recruitment
None of this answers the harder question, which is why so many young Americans keep enlisting in a movement whose track record is this transparent. Part of the answer is generational. They have never lived under socialism. They have been taught its history by professors who consider every previous attempt a near-miss. They confuse Scandinavia, which runs a market economy with a heavy welfare overlay, with the regimes described above.
But the deeper reason is that they have been radicalized by a problem socialism caused, then sold socialism as the cure. Federal student loan programs inflated tuition into impossibility. Credentialism turned the working-class trades into objects of cultural contempt. Zoning laws written by political donors made housing artificially scarce.
The young Americans who voted for Mamdani and Wilson are not wrong that something is broken. They have just been handed the wrong diagnosis by the very class that broke it. Mamdani is the son of a Columbia professor and an internationally famous filmmaker. Wilson studied at Oxford. The people selling socialism are almost never the people who would suffer under it. They are the people who would administer it.
The Israelites in the eighth chapter of First Samuel demanded a king to rule over them like the other nations. God told Samuel to warn them what centralized power would actually do to them. He will take your sons, the warning went, and appoint them for himself. He will take your daughters. He will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.
The pattern is older than Marx. Whenever a people demand to be ruled rather than governed, the rulers take exactly what God said they would take. Cuba took it. Venezuela took it. North Korea took it. New York and Seattle are watching it begin.
The wealthy who can afford to leave are leaving. Apollo, Citadel, Starbucks, and Howard Schultz did not wait for the third year of the experiment. They saw the warning in the first chapter and walked. The Americans who cannot leave will be the ones who pay the bill, just as they have in every previous run of this experiment.
Mamdani and Wilson are not failing their constituents. They are succeeding for the political class they actually serve, which is the same class that has always been served by this system. The intentions were never good. The question is whether the country is finally willing to stop pretending otherwise.
