A catastrophe looms over the Big Apple.

New York State Assembly member and Democratic New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during an interview on “The Story with Martha MacCallum” at FOX News on Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Because it’s New York City and not Ames, Iowa, New York’s mayoral race is a national story. If you believe the polls, avowed socialist Zohran Mamdani is a shoo-in. If he does win, the very epicenter of American capitalism will be consigned to the leadership of a mayor who hates capitalism.

Mamdani is uniquely dangerous. Not because he is going to round up and execute his political opponents, though his ideological predecessors have done just that (see: Joe Stalin).

Mamdani is politically dangerous because he is unusually smart and unusually articulate. He has an easy way about him in public. He’s engaging. And he has the oratorical skills to make his lunatic policy positions sound plausible.

Let’s take his idea of city owned grocery stores as an example. It goes like this. City owned grocery stores would be freed of the pressures to generate a profit, he says. They wouldn’t be subject to the capitalistic demands of shareholders. Therefore, city owned grocery stores would be able to make food more affordable for low-income consumers.

Never mind that the government owns the grocery stores in Cuba and that the beleaguered citizens of Cuba wait in lines only to barely get enough food to sustain life every day. (But good news: Cuba doesn’t have America’s obesity problem.)

Socialism does not work. It has never worked. The blood-drenched pages of history are filled with examples. It is a severe indictment of the American education system that kids in school are abjectly ignorant of this historical fact.

The Pilgrims’ colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts was established in 1620. The colony was funded by British investors who hoped that the colonists would produce crops and other goods that could be shipped back to England and sold at a profit. The Plymouth Colony was socialist – a communal effort where colonists were to work toward the greater good. But by 1623, they were destitute, unable to even feed themselves, let alone produce anything for export back to England.

Human nature got in the way. Some of the colonists were industrious. Some were slackers. Those who worked and carried their weight came to resent those who ate just as well by laboring less. The colony fell apart.

Eventually, a desperate governor William Bradford encouraged family farming by allocating land to colonists based on family size. Shortage quickly turned to surplus. Prosperity followed.

Thus were sown the seeds of capitalism on the North American continent.

Those seeds would eventually blossom into the nation that would lift more people out of poverty than any other society or nation in history.

Not to say that capitalism is perfect. No human construct is. And capitalism is particularly unkind to those who choose ignorance and idleness over education and industry.

But capitalism and socialism have both been around long enough to have created a record. And that record is unmistakable.

Capitalism is rooted in individual freedom. Prosperity follows.

Socialism is rooted in conformity. Misery follows.

These things are objectively true, no matter how eloquently Mamdani professes otherwise.