The free market reforms instituted by The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos seem to have taken a firm hold as its old guard commentariat is now openly repudiating the pipe dreams of socialism.
The Post columnist Megan McArdle chose to hit leftists with a pretty harsh reality check in her June 21 op-ed headlined, “Socialism is back in vogue. Wait for reality to set in.”
McArdle argued that while “[i]t has never been a better time in America to be a socialist” as ardent communists and anti-capitalist politicians now run uber-liberal blue cities like Seattle and New York City, “the excesses of progressive governance are helping to make the party’s brand toxic in the less true-blue areas.” As she concluded in her sub-header, “Taxing the rich sounds good, until they move away.” Who knew capital incentive was a thing for a functioning economy!
When considering the recent uptick in prominent CEOs signaling their retaliatory measures to leave Zohran Mamdani’s New York City following his insane taxation threats, McArdle’s implication was that this is reflective of how unworkable the economy-killing socialist model really is:
Without the exuberant demand from an oversize millennial generation, mayors are rediscovering the hard reality of urban governance: It is much easier to leave a city than it is to leave a state or a country, so the tax base is more constrained, and the scope for punitive business regulations much smaller.
Common sense and socialist utopianism make very strange bedfellows, to say the least. The reason why socialism was a much easier sell in the early-to-mid 20th century, per McArdle, was a “practically virgin tax base” that “was ripe for the plucking.” Now that the U.S. boasts the most punitively progressive tax system in the developed world and with a boatload of feckless government programs and extremely lackluster results to boot, modern-day leftists are hard-pressed to make their old bag of talking points stick in the long-run, despite all the “freebie” bluster. As McArdle concluded:
Those [government] services are often absurdly expensive for what they deliver. American infrastructure costs, for example, are a scandal. But every excessive cost is someone else’s income, and that someone will fight like a cornered tiger if you try to reduce their income by one thin dime. This eats up fiscal capacity that might otherwise be used to fund new services. New York, D.C., Seattle and Chicago are wrestling with major structural budget gaps.
In the end, economics is economics. And no amount of political pandering will change the way money works or how it operates in real time. Shoutout to Bezos for making The Post opinion section somewhat readable again.
