France: Far left presidential candidate calls for suspension of interest on national debt

CHÂTEAUNEUF-SUR-ISÈRE, France — Jean-Luc Mélenchon has a radical idea to help solve France’s financial challenges: “set fire” to a large chunk of its public debt.

The far-left presidential contender would essentially have the European Central Bank agree to waive interest payments on a massive tranche of French bonds.

Coming from a top presidential hopeful, the proposal has triggered a flurry of criticism from leading economists and politicians, who have denounced it as irresponsible and dangerous for the economic stability of the country and the entire European Union.

Read the rest here.

Bill Maher: Yes, the DSA are a bunch of commies

The DSA Envisions a ‘World Without Prisons,’ but Not One Without Camps

The list of things the Democratic Socialists of America want to abolish is long: federal immigration enforcement agencies and the borders they police, the Pentagon, the Senate, the Electoral College, the two-party system, and the Constitution’s separation of powers among them. But it’s the existence of America’s prisons, and the justice system that consigns convicts to incarceration, that seems to irritate the DSA’s vanguard most.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called for “prison abolition” designed to “abolish our carceral system.” The Democratic nominee in New York’s 13th district, Darializa Avila Chevalier, couldn’t agree more. “I am an abolitionist and oppose reform that entrenches the expansion of the carceral state,” she wrote. CNN described Zohran Mamdani as “evasive” when the New York City mayor was asked whether he sought the end of incarceration as we know it. “There are prisons,” he replied with remarkable obtuseness when asked if there “should be” prisons. Mamdani skeptics were probably not persuaded that he had abandoned his longtime confusion over the “purpose” of prisons.

Of course, defunding the police is part and parcel of this campaign. “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,” the Democratic Party’s likely nominee for Wisconsin governor, Francesca Hong, once insisted. Such reforms are a sine qua non if we are to realize her “perfect world,” which “would be a world without prisons.”

The press rather gently describes these views as “ambitious” or even “aspirational,” but the DSA’s most notable agitators are not dealing in metaphors. It would be foolish, however, to expect DSA candidates to “explain the nuances of prison abolition in a hostile media environment,” the Maoist influencer Hasan Piker brooded. “We need far more political education, power [and] credibility before we get there.”

Some of the DSA’s candidates appear to struggle with the concept of criminality itself. For her part, Chevalier agonized over the impossible moral conundrum presented by murder, and whether punishing the murderer renders us complicit in some cosmic injustice. And yet, for all the DSA’s hostility toward the conventional methods for punishing criminals, most of them can still summon passion for prosecuting crime as they define it.

Read the rest here.

New York City's Loyal Opposition

Reihan Salam has a lot in common with the man he is trying to stop.

They went to rival New York City public high schools. Both are South Asian Muslim men with a talent for remembering faces and names. Mr. Salam, the head of the conservative Manhattan Institute, and his democratic socialist foil, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, both favor merch embroidered with the same 1970s cursive City of New York insignia.

They share something else. They are convinced that their beloved city is in crisis. For the mayor, the crisis is affordability. For Mr. Salam, the crisis is Mr. Mamdani.

“You have a couple of decades of prosperity that are slipping away,” said Mr. Salam, 46, who lives with his family in a Brooklyn neighborhood that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Mamdani. “We are squandering this incredible opportunity to show that urban life can work.”

He fears that many of his fellow New Yorkers have been seduced by what he sees as the mayor’s vilification of the city’s wealthiest residents and misled by Mr. Mamdani’s vision of free buses, free child care and frozen rent. He believes the mayor’s big plans to subsidize the costs of city life for even well-off New Yorkers (“unlimited welfarism for the near-rich,” Mr. Salam calls it) could steer New York City into a financial tailspin reminiscent of the dark days of the 1970s.

To counter all that, Mr. Salam is trying to make the Manhattan Institute, a think tank with a roster of New York City obsessives, the intellectual engine of the resistance.

Slowing down the mayor and his popular movement will be no easy task, as others have discovered. The city’s vaunted business elite spent tens of millions of dollars trying to persuade voters that Mr. Mamdani’s ideas about capitalism and Israel were too radical for New York, without success. The Democratic establishment has largely been cowed by the mayor’s political strength. Elected Republicans are so outnumbered in New York that they have no real power to stop him.

Neither does the Manhattan Institute. Over a half-century, the organization has lobbied constantly for shrinking the city’s sprawling bureaucracy and letting private industry work its magic. The election of a democratic socialist marks a low point for the institute in New York, where its project has never been further from the halls of power.

But Mr. Salam, its president since 2019, sees an opportunity. Mr. Mamdani’s electric campaign has created unusual interest in big ideas about what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to administering government in the city.

Where some right-wing critics have caricatured the mayor as a communist, a jihadist and a candidate for deportation, Mr. Salam and his fellow conservative urbanists are testing a less hyperbolic approach. They have taken direct aim at Mr. Mamdani’s policy agenda, deploying deep knowledge of city history and policy expertise to try to serve as a voice of skepticism whispering in the city’s collective ear.

Do people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year really need free child care?

Read the rest here.

The DSA is the political equivalent to the Flat Earth Society. They are not serious people. The MI on the other hand is a refreshingly sober group of people offering cogent alternatives to the fringe platform of the DSA and its followers.

The Problem With Middle Class Socialism

Have you heard the news? The socialists are winning. Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York. Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, having won their respective Democratic primaries in deep-blue congressional districts, are set to become members of the U.S. House. So is 29-year-old Melat Kiros, who recently stunned the party by knocking out 15-term Colorado Representative Diana DeGette by 13 points.

All of them are members of the Democratic Socialists of America. The group, which went from obscurity in the 1980s to a Beltway punchline in the 2010s, now holds more than 250 offices in 40 states. Say what you will about DSA, but it’s is no longer a fringe organization.

I mention all this not to relitigate the merits of rent freezes, Medicare for All, abolishing the police, or government-run grocery stores. I agree with many of the group’s positions and with the underlying conviction that American society needs to be rebuilt from the foundation up. Which is exactly why DSA’s rise worries me. For it to truly succeed, and become a nationwide movement that transforms American politics, it will have to do more than fight on behalf the “working class” and actually start resembling the working class.

Appeals to the working class are rampant in the DSA. Mamdani, who acknowledges his “privileged upbringing,” is fond of saying, “I fight for working people.” Valdez, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who left a program assistant job at Columbia University to join the New York State Assembly, declared on the night of her primary victory that she would be “a fighting force for the entire working class.” Chevalier, who had a poor upbringing but went on to become a Columbia graduate and now a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at CUNY, describes herself as a “working-class Dominican New Yorker.”

But here’s the problem: They don’t fit the part. Their finances may or may not equate with the working class, but they’re not working class. Sure, they might “work to pay … bills,” which Mamdani, rather squirrelly, has said is “one definition of being a part of the working class.” But that expansive definition won’t fly with most observers—especially not those whom we commonly think of as working class, which is to say non-college-educated workers who rely on an hourly wage. Rather, these DSA politicians are part, as their hipster glasses convey all too well, of the college-educated creative class. And that’s true of the DSA broadly. It simply is not a working-class organization.

If history is any indication, that’s cause for concern. George Orwell diagnosed the problem nearly a century ago. In 1936, with socialism in retreat amid fascist takeovers in Europe, he was sent north by the Left Book Club to document working-class life in industrial England. He came back not with the tidy indictment of capitalism his publisher was expecting but with The Road to Wigan Pier, half of which presented a devastating account of English coal-mining poverty, and the other half a lengthy, still-controversial essay about why working people, the miners themselves, didn’t like socialists.

It wasn’t that the miners disagreed with socialist principles, Orwell said. Instead, he pointed to the obvious fact of the class divide, diagnosing the problem of “middle-class” socialism: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”

It remains one of the great insults in English political writing, and it still gets at the heart of the matter today, as it relates to the question of class solidarity. “I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists,” Orwell added, a little more soberly, “and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners.”

Read the rest here.

Do Dumb Ideas Ever Die?

In one of the great scenes of one of the great gangster movies, Mike Newell’s “Donnie Brasco,” an aging Mafioso named Lefty Ruggiero paces a hospital corridor while his son fights for his life following a drug overdose.

“Twenty-eight years, you can read it on his birth certificate: Bellevue Hospital,” Lefty, played by Al Pacino, tells Donnie, played by Johnny Depp, about his comatose son. “Now he’s back, in there, and I’m out here, worried to my death. And he’s asleep in there, same as 28 years ago, with the same expression. He’s made no progress.”

It’s a line that could apply just as well to America’s policy debates.

Twenty-eight years ago — that was 1997, when “Donnie Brasco” came out — we thought we had made progress, at least when it came to answering some of the larger questions that had roiled 20th-century politics.

Trade protectionism? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and beggar-thy-neighbor policies of the 1930s showed us the worldwide economic ruin to which that could lead. Government stakes in private enterprise, like the Trump administration’s recent equity stake in Intel? The record of state investment in, or control of, private enterprises, from Solyndra to Sematech (not to mention Alitalia or “Such a Bad Experience Never Again” Sabena), is mostly a story of financial disappointment, taxpayer bailouts, managerial incompetence, political interference and cronyism.

America First? The slogan of Charles Lindbergh and other pre-World War II isolationists should have been buried forever on Dec. 7, 1941. Instead, it emerged from its grave some 75 years later.

But it isn’t just the Trump administration that is reawakening the moral and intellectual zombies of the past. Everywhere one looks there are policy necromancers.

The platform of the national Democratic Socialists of America calls for a 32-hour workweek “with no reduction in pay or benefits”; “free public universal child care and pre-K”; “college for all”; the cancellation of “all student-loan debt”; “universal rent control”; “massive public investment to transition away from fossil fuels”; “guaranteed support for workers in the fossil fuel industry,” and “expansive paid family leave.” Not only would American workers stand to benefit, but so would everybody else, since the D.S.A. wants to offer these benefits to anyone who wishes to come to United States through an open-borders policy.

How would the D.S.A. pay for all this? By soaking the rich, along with “for-profit corporations, large inheritances, and private colleges and universities.” Why did nobody think of this before?

Oh, wait — many did. “Bolivarian socialism,” welcomed by the Jeremy Corbyns of the world, took Venezuela from being South America’s richest country to a humanitarian catastrophe. Sweden attempted a form of socialism in the 1970s and ’80s, only to reverse course after it experienced massive capital flight and a financial crisis during which interest rates hit 75 percent. France’s Socialist government imposed a 75 percent tax on earnings over one million euros in 2012; it dropped the tax two years later as the wealthy packed their bags. Britain’s National Health Service, whose advocates chronically complain is “underfunded,” is in a state of perpetual crisis even as health care, according to the BBC, gobbles up roughly one third of government spending.

“The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money,” Margaret Thatcher once observed. To put it another way, you can’t abolish billionaires, as Zohran Mamdani, the D.S.A.’s poster child, would like, and still expect them to keep footing your bills.

Read the rest here.

Zohran Mamdani’s Victory in NYC Rattles Wall Street

...Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard University, also expressed his distaste Mamdani’s nomination.

“I am profoundly alarmed about the future of the [Democratic National Committee] and the country, by yesterday’s NYC anointment of a candidate who failed to disavow a ‘globalize the intifada’ slogan and advocated Trotskyite economic policies,” Summers said in a post on X.

Part of the stock market has already felt the pain from the prospect of a Mamdani-led NYC. Shares of New York regional bank Flagstar, with exposure to the New York real estate market, sank nearly 4% Wednesday. Office-focused real estate stocks also suffered, with SL Green Realty down more than 6% and Vornado Realty Trust down nearly 7%.

Mamdani advocates for universal rent control, and the New York City mayor has the power to appoint representatives to the regulatory board that oversees rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments. A pause on rent increases would hurt the profits of multi-family rental properties.

Roughly one million New York City apartments are rent stabilized but only about 20,000 are still rent controlled.

“It appears that NYC is electing to commit suicide by Mayor,” Jim Bianco, president and macro strategist at Bianco Research, said in a post on X Tuesday evening.

Read the rest here.

I promise you free this, that, and the other thing.

Just don't check my math.

Venezuela

Irony

New York's Democratic Socialists have run afoul of the state's infamously byzantine red tape and may be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars. This could put a serious strain on the party's finances.

Quote of the day: Javier Milei unloads at Davos

Milei's 2024 Davos talk, directly translated to English by AI (by heygen), in his own accent. Better than the dubbed version imo. pic.twitter.com/8OAGELuqxl

— Aaron Slodov (@aphysicist) January 18, 2024

"Socialism always and everywhere makes people poorer. It has failed in every country where it has been tried. Failed economically, socially and culturally. And it has murdered more than a hundred million people."

New York: Good cause eviction?

...There’s no more worrisome sign of how far New York has drifted—or been steered—toward official socialism than the possibility that “Good Cause Eviction” is on the table in Albany and possibly headed toward passage. Named in the venerable progressive tradition of calling things by what they aren’t, Good Cause Eviction has nothing to do either with “good causes” or “eviction.” The legislation—the most radical version by far of similar laws in a few other jurisdictions—would give all tenants statewide perpetual rights of residence at their current rent, with increases capped at a minimal level.

What the proponents of the bill call “eviction” is an abuse of ordinary language. Eviction normally means that a tenant is forced to vacate, justly or not, a property he rents, typically for reasons of nonpayment of rent or an egregious violation of the conditions of the lease. The Good Cause Eviction law radically expands the definition of eviction to cover an increase in the rent that the tenant prefers not to pay. A tenant in an unregulated, market-rate apartment who decides to move rather than accept a 5 percent or 10 percent rent increase is, in the logic of the bill’s supporters, a victim of eviction.

Good Cause Eviction would cap rent increases at 3 percent, or 150 percent of the rate of inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), whichever is higher, in all rental units except those in small, owner-occupied buildings. Landlords would be obligated to offer tenants a renewal lease every year unless they can demonstrate that they need the unit to house themselves or a close relative.

But the costs associated with the maintenance of housing stock that is often 100 years old can be unpredictable and wildly outstrip CPI. The cost of property taxes, variable mortgage interest, insurance, heating oil, repairs, and renovations will force property owners seeking a higher rent adjustment to enter housing court to fight for an exemption from the rent-increase cap. Tenants, it may be noted, now enjoy a right to counsel in housing court, and can get a free state-funded attorney to represent them; property owners must cover the cost of their representation. The backlog in housing court is now measured in years, so landlords must be prepared to swallow costs for an extraordinary period before even getting a chance at recouping their losses.

Critics of the proposal have called it “universal rent control,” which advocates insist is not reflective of the bill’s intents or purposes. In fact, it would be more accurate to describe Good Cause Eviction as a massive power grab. If passed, the law would bring 4 million privately owned rental units across New York State under an extraordinary regulatory regime that would effectively amount to seizing ownership. It would become nearly impossible to sell these properties, at least at current valuation, because potential buyers would be constrained in their use of the buildings. Purchasing properties in undervalued neighborhoods with the intention of renovating and rehabilitating them would become an uneconomic proposition. Development would grind to a halt, as new units would immediately fall under the law.

The key sponsor of Good Cause Eviction legislation is Democratic Socialist state senator Julia Salazar, who openly champions the socialization of the housing market, even by force. Explaining the difference between a “progressive” and a “democratic socialist,” Salazar told Jacobin in 2018 that “a progressive might advocate for forcing landlords to do necessary repairs on buildings. But unless you advocate for universal rent control and frankly, eventually, the abolition of private property . . . what you’re actually doing is just kicking the can down the road.”

More recently, addressing a report that the 2019 reforms strengthening rent regulations in New York City—eliminating a “vacancy bump” allowance that let landlords rehab newly-vacant apartments and pass on part of the cost to new tenants—have resulted in as many as 60,000 apartments sitting idle because it would be uneconomic to renovate them, Salazar tweeted: “Expropriate them and allow community land trusts to acquire the properties to actually house people.”

Read the rest here.

The civil war on the left

The progressive magazine The Nation published an open letter last month in which former members of the radical 1960s organization Students for a Democratic Society pleaded with a younger generation of leftists to support Joe Biden for president. The letter, titled “To the New New Left From the Old New Left,” warned that the re-election of President Trump would jeopardize “the very existence of American democracy.”

The signatories expressed fear that some supporters of Bernie Sanders, including members of the Democratic Socialists of America, would “refuse to support” Mr. Biden because they consider him “a representative of Wall Street Capital” — and therefore, in essential respects, not fundamentally better than Mr. Trump.

The letter was fair and sensible in its reasoning and right-minded in its conclusion. Given that the difference of a few thousand votes in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin might allow Mr. Trump to win a second term, a quixotic display of socialist principle in the 2020 election could have disastrous repercussions for the nation and the world.

Unfortunately, the letter’s fears were well-founded. The Democratic Socialists of America had already declined to back Mr. Biden. It has been joined in that refusal by Jacobin magazine, an influential publication among young leftists.

Read the rest here.

L.A. Wants To Seize Private Apartment Building to Prevent Rent Increases

Los Angeles politicians will make housing affordable, by force if necessary.

On Friday, City Councilmember Gil Cedillo introduced a motion that asks city staff to draft plans for using eminent domain to seize Hillside Villa Apartments, a 124-unit, privately-owned development in the city's Chinatown neighborhood to avoid rent increases at the property.

The property is currently under an affordability covenant that requires its owner to rent out a number of its units at below-market rates. That covenant is set to expire soon, meaning rents on some 59 units will increase to market rates—which means rent hikes of up to $1,000 per unit.

"We think it is important enough that we need to take action to preserve those units. We don't want to generate more homeless people," Conrado Terrazas Cross, Cedillo's communications director, tells Reason, saying that many tenants would not be able to afford the coming rent increases.

"I think it's a brilliant idea but I need to know: Are we in Cuba or Venezuela?" says Tom Botz, the L.A.-area developer who owns the building, about the proposal to seize his property.

Botz tells Reason he purchased the development company that built Hillside Villa roughly 20 years ago. The building's construction had been financed by a number of government grants and loans, including a $5.4 million loan from Los Angeles' since-abolished Community Redevelopment Agency in 1986.

A condition of that loan was that the developer rent out units in the building at below-market rates for 30 years. Other government grants and loans that helped finance the building came with their own specific affordability requirements.

The affordability requirements from the redevelopment loan were supposed to expire in June 2019. Beginning in May 2018, tenants in Hillside Villa started to receive notices that their below-market rents would be increasing in a year's time. In March 2019, tenants were given the option of signing new leases at the increased rates or face eviction.

Read the rest here.

Germany's hard-Left 'Corbyn problem' is only just beginning

Germany has a giant "Corbyn problem" of its own. The Social Democrat base has been captured by hard-Left youth activists and has repudiated the core policy positions of the party leadership and Germany’s post-war consensus.

The difference is that the venerable SPD is not in opposition. It is for the time being the second pillar of Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition, with "co-determination" powers over economic policy and the strategic direction of Europe.

The weekend "revolution" of the SPD congress saw vows to reverse the free-market Hartz IV labour reforms of the Gerhard Schroder era and embrace a 2pc wealth tax, doubling down on a tax experiment abandoned in the 1990s as unworkable and economically destructive.

The SPD delegates voted for a rent freeze in the big cities, a stretch in unemployment benefits to 36 months, a 30pc rise in the minimum wage, and a much higher carbon tax.

They want to abandon the "black zero" straightjacket of a balanced budget and launch a fiscal blitz of 1.5 million units of social housing, with €45bn of extra infrastructure and investment spending (1.2pc of GDP) every year for the next decade.

Peter Ramsauer from the Bavarian Social Christians (CSU) called it a “fantasy socialist wishlist” that renders the coalition effectively impossible. “A wealth tax will drive productive capital out of the country. The SPD will ruin itself first, and then the German economy,” he said.

Read the rest here.

California Shows The Limits Of Progressivism

More than 2 million Californians recently were left without power after the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric—which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year—preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.
 
Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so overregulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents, and infectious diseases.

Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.

The demand for socialism is on the rise from young Americans today. But is socialism even morally sound? 

Taxpayers in California, whose basket of sales, gasoline, and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while immobile on antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous, and under nonstop makeshift repair.

Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon—the result of high taxes, hyper-regulation, and green mandates—add insult to the injury of stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state’s failing high-speed rail project.

Read the rest here.

UK: The radical proposals that Labour will debate

• Green New Deal (Zero carbon by 2030)- Show me the money
• Abolish Private Schools- In the finest tradition of class warfare
• Four Day Work Week- With no loss of pay 
• Abolition of Immigrant Detention Centers- Because Britain needs millions of illegal immigrants from cultures highly resistant to assimilation 
• Compulsory purchase of empty houses with rents linked to local incomes- Private property? Whats that?
• Give workers 1% of company stock every year for an as yet undefined period- Is it still red baiting if your favorite color really is red?

Details.

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez May be in Trouble

A list of political donors to AOC's reelection campaign show almost none from within her own district. Only ten(!) residents of her district have been named in required FEC filings. It needs to be noted that the FEC only requires donations of $200 and up to be listed, but this is still a shocking report.

In my view this represents her failure to remember Tip O'Neil's famous maxim that "all politics is local." While the self proclaimed socialist Congresswoman has become the darling of the hard left, and standing between her and a television news camera has been reportedly dangerous to one's health, there remains a serious question. What has she done for the people of her district? Aside from saving them from the horror of thousands of good paying jobs that Amazon was going bring, I can't think of anything.

Details

Video from the 2019 Democratic Socialists of America Convention

You can't make this stuff up and it is impervious to satire.

HT: Rod Dreher

Sweden Isn't Socialist (mostly)

For years, I've heard American leftists say Sweden is proof that socialism works, that it doesn't have to turn out as badly as the Soviet Union or Cuba or Venezuela did.

But that's not what Swedish historian Johan Norberg says in a new documentary and Stossel TV video.

"Sweden is not socialist -- because the government doesn't own the means of production. To see that, you have to go to Venezuela or Cuba or North Korea," says Norberg.

"We did have a period in the 1970s and 1980s when we had something that resembled socialism: a big government that taxed and spent heavily. And that's the period in Swedish history when our economy was going south."

Per capita GDP fell. Sweden's growth fell behind other countries. Inflation increased.

Even socialistic Swedes complained about the high taxes.

Astrid Lindgren, author of the popular Pippi Longstocking children's books, discovered that she was losing money by being popular. She had to pay a tax of 102 percent on any new book she sold.

"She wrote this angry essay about a witch who was mean and vicious -- but not as vicious as the Swedish tax authorities," says Norberg.

Yet even those high taxes did not bring in enough money to fund Sweden's big welfare state.

"People couldn't get the pension that they thought they depended on for the future," recounts Norberg. "At that point the Swedish population just said, enough, we can't do this."

Sweden then reduced government's role.

They cut public spending, privatized the national rail network, abolished certain government monopolies, eliminated inheritance taxes and sold state-owned businesses like the maker of Absolut vodka.

Read the rest here.