They’re Trying to Eliminate Landlords, Not Regulate Them

Slow-motion Communism

There are two types of people: those who understand the Left and those who don’t.

The latter are forever good-naturedly assuming that their opposite numbers simply don’t understand how the market works and don’t understand that the added burden of onerous regulations will raise prices, force companies out of the marketplace and make life worse.

The former realize that the Left understands this all too well and that’s why it’s doing it.

Since the conservative movement is still full of people who studied Locke and Adam Smith rather than Lenin,and Mao and can lecture about the ‘wisdom of the market’, but don’t have a clue about what makes leftists tick, New York City’s rent freeze and latest round of regulations, accompanied by sky-high average rents in the city, led to a round of “but don’t you see”.

The Left sees quite well what it’s doing. That’s why Mamdani appointed Cea Weaver (pictured above) as his Tenant Director and stood behind her after she had tweeted that “private property is a weapon of white supremacy”, “Impoverish the *white* middle class” and “we’ll transition from treating property as an individual good to a collective good. Whites especially will be impacted.”

The plan isn’t to ‘regulate’ landlords, in Maoist style the plan is to eliminate them by driving as many of them out of the market as possible, then seizing the buildings and using taxpayer money to hand them over to allied ‘community groups’. Call it slow motion Communism.

Apply this sort of thing to every arena and you get a sense of how socialism is being ‘built’.

And the sooner we understand this, the better, because we are plagued by those who earnestly argue against insane tax proposals like the ones driving billionaires out of California by warning that it will wreck the tax base and the financial revenue models of entire states. The Left is not concerned with the tax base or financial revenue models, but with destroying capitalism.

Doing as much damage along the way is not a misunderstanding, it’s the point of the exercise.

The USSR and Communist China both touched off famines that killed millions of people, worsening their implementation at every stage and weaponizing them to wipe out populations and groups that they considered politically unsuitable. The Left isn’t ‘accidentally’ causing economic chaos in the United States because it doesn’t understand economics: it exists to expose and create weaknesses in our economy in order to impose its version of economics.

When the Left says that millionaires, billionaires, landlords, businessmen and private enterprise shouldn’t exist, that’s not an ‘unrealistic program’, it’s a horrible realistic one that it tried before across parts of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America with terrible consequences.

And the sooner we wake up to that, the better.

The only difference between the so-called moderates and extremists is that the former will work within the system to wreck free enterprise while the latter plant bombs and stage street riots. And, contrary to all the twittering over Antifa, it’s the ones wearing suits and issuing policy papers within the system who are a million times more dangerous than the rioters in black.

Even in the United States for nearly a century, government operations have been their means for eliminating one way of life and bringing another way of life into being. Over the last sixty years, the vast majority of government policies, statewide and nationwide, have existed to eliminate every American strength, to wipe out its economy, its finances and its people.

And for much of that time, they have faced little opposition except from free marketers farcically explaining to the Left that wrecking the free market will be bad for the free market. Since the 90s, only now has there been any kind of informed and meaningful opposition by people in public office to leftists at the policy level, not just from corporate lobbies and free marketers, but from those who have some understanding of what the Left is and what it’s doing to America.

Still very few will put it into simple words and lay the blame for the ‘affordability crisis’ on the same people who ramped up the price of everything, who created a wage-price spiral, who banned logging and complain about the price of housing, who banned drilling and complain about oil company ‘greed’, and who tax everything and complain that families can’t make it.

Their solution to the crises they created is to sneer about “late-stage capitalism” and replace it with socialism. Under socialism, everyone will have health care of the sub-Medicaid variety, on a 6-12 month waiting list, with euthanasia being offered to any patient in a bed. Under socialism, there will be housing projects for all (and homes only for the elite), there will be food rations for all (and restaurants for the elites), and there will be worthless inflationary money for all.

This program may not sound very appealing. At least not until the economy is sufficiently wrecked, that life is miserable enough, and the future bleak enough, that anything seems as if it would be an improvement. Until then there will be regulations meant to crush free enterprise and policies feeding a welfare state, and an ‘alternative economy’ run by leftist organizations and subsidized by the government that won’t work locally, let alone be suitable to run at scale.

But New York City will get to be the latest testbed for socialism as the Mamdani regime continues forcing apartments off the market, and then seizing apartments for public housing. Unlike free enterprise, socialism can only exist by eliminating the competition, and the only way to eliminate free enterprise is by using the government to make it unworkable and then forbidden. In a country with free elections, that requires a stealth campaign by radicals who pretend to be regulating free enterprise when they’re actually out to completely eliminate it.

It’s past time for conservatives to speak the plain truth about what is happening in America.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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Thank you for reading.

Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.