Transcription
So, Zoran Mandani is going to be the new mayor of New York, which has many people a little concerned. A communist, the mayor of the financial capital of the world, the bastion of capitalism. So, how did we get here?
Well, many people, not just New Yorkers, feel crushed by skyrocketing rents, stagnant wages, and a system that seems rigged for the few. Since so many people have become disillusioned with capitalism, Mandani has found support by promising to tackle the issues of the housing crisis, health care costs, and the broader issue of affordability. The problem, however, is trying to fix affordability with communism is like promising to put out a fire with gasoline.
First of all, what even is communism? Here are the core principles. Simply put, no private property. Everything is collectively owned. This means no private ownership of businesses or of profits. Production and prices are controlled collectively but really by the state. The means of production like factories, farmland all belong to the community but again more like to the state. Goods are distributed based on need not income or merit. There's no market competition. So all central planning is done by the state. This means that needs like resources, housing, materials are allocated not by demand but estimated by the government.
Point number two, no social classes. All people are equal in status. The goal here is a classless society. Wealth and resources are shared equally among all citizens and is specifically determined by the government according to a person's need. So if you have two children, you get more than if you have one child. Religion and family ties are seen as tools of oppression under Marxist theory because they create loyalties that compete with the state. In a communist system, your ultimate allegiance is meant to be to the collective, not to God, not to family, but to the ideology itself.
Last point, finally, the role of the state exists temporarily to enforce equality, but is supposed to wither away over time, but it never really does. And we'll talk about why later.
So, communism offers this vision of a perfect utopia built on equality and fairness. It envisions a society where workers are empowered and essentials like healthare, housing, and education are free for everyone. In this vision, there are no rich, there are no poor, no class divisions, no competition, no consumerism, but just collective harmony. It promises to liberate people from the suffering and inequality of capitalism by creating this world where everyone truly stands on equal ground.
So, psychologically, the real draw of communism is this moral promise. The idea of a system built on fairness. It offers not just an equal opportunity, but an equal outcome, erasing the imbalance between those who have everything and those who have nothing. In a free society like ours, we see inequality in plain sight. And in the age of social media, that awareness becomes almost unbearable. The rich broadcast their excess, the yachts, the mansions, the private jets, while ordinary people struggle to just pay rent. To many people, this contrast doesn't just feel unfair, it feels immoral. So when communism declares from each according to his ability to each according to his need, it sounds less like an ideology and more like justice. The moral correction to a world gone mad with greed.
With this wondrous vision, how has it fared practically? Has communism ever worked? No, it hasn't. Every time that it has been tried, the results have been the same. Economic collapse, scarcity, and dependence on authoritarian control. Far from the state withering away as Markx imagined, the idealists are soon purged and the power consolidates under a single party dictatorship.
When they tried this in the Soviet Union, to say that productivity plummeted would be an understatement. By the 1980s, the USSR was importing over 40 million tons of grain annually just to feed its people despite having the world's largest farmland. This is because the government-ledd quota system was an economic disaster. Farmers had no incentive to produce beyond their assigned targets, and innovation was punished rather than rewarded. The result was chronic inefficiency. Fields were left uncultivated and crops abandoned. All of the machinery left broken down and a bureaucracy too rigid to respond to shortages. In pursuit of this vision of equality and the greater good, communist regimes caused widespread famines through sheer ineptitude and maintain control through purges. Under Stalin alone, an estimated 20 million people perished, including roughly 6 million during the 1932 famine.
In mouse, China, the implementation of collectivized farming and price controls led to severe shortages and inefficiencies. Farmers were diverted from tending to crops in order to serve the Great Leap Forward, a disastrous industrialization campaign that triggered the Great Famine. The result, 30 to 45 million people perished over the course of 3 years.
All instances of attempted communism had the same pattern. Economies that once thrived under limited capitalism stagnated under state ownership and rigid planning. The same is true for more recent attempts like in Venezuela. Promises of equality and free essentials began as populist reforms. But over time, private enterprise was crushed, inflation soared, and basic goods vanished from shelves. In 2018, hyperinflation hit 1.7 million%, forcing millions to flee while oil production, once the economy's backbone, plummeted from 3.5 million barrels per day in 1998 to under 500,000 by 2020. And when there's no oil, there's no money, no electricity, and no food. Naturally, this crisis caused widespread violence and deaths because of shortages.
The communist dream of fairness quickly turns into economic paralysis where everyone becomes equally poor except for those in power of course who find a way to secretly hoard fortunes. Stalin had his country houses and imported luxuries while his people starved. Mao had private villas, Swiss watches, foreign cars and had a certain type of fish shipped hundreds of miles because I guess he liked it so much. This was at the same time that his people were forced to eat tree bark. In Cuba, Fidel Castro amassed a $900 million offshore empire. North Korea's Kim dynasty have amassed billions in Swiss accounts. All while there's widespread malnutrition with an estimated 10 million people in need of urgent food assistance.
This idea of a classless society is really just a myth. Instead, a new ruling class is established. But instead of getting there by building wealth by selling goods or services to people, it's through power. And this power is fortified under this guise of being for the people.
So this is a good time to talk about why every single instance of communism ends up devolving into a totalitarian regime. That promise of the dictatorship of the proletariat quickly turns into a dictatorship over the proletariat which is enforced by secret police, censorship and mass surveillance. In the Soviet Union, Lenin and Stalin executed or imprisoned millions who questioned the state in any way. And by 1953, the gulach system held over 2.4 4 million prisoners in conditions that killed roughly 1.7 million people. Mao's for the people policies gave way to the cultural revolution where red guards who were really just brainwashed teenagers beat, humiliated or murdered an estimated 1 to2 million class enemies. The pattern is ironclad. Without private property or free markets to disperse power, the state monopolizes it all and then the monopoly turns into terror.
But why does that happen? To understand this, we have to start with human nature. People often claim to be for equality with their words, but they actually chase inequality with their actions. Every single one of us is trying to find a way to stand out, to get a raise, to move ahead, to rise above the average because standing out is human nature. It's this impulse that laid roads, created our skylines, and even got us to the moon. Communism's fatal mistake is to declare war on that drive and expect gratitude.
Life is not fair. We all know this. Some people are nepo babies blowing daddy's money on a yacht and others are born into households of addicts struggling just to survive. So communism said that there is nothing but unhappiness in this mad capitalistinduced race where some people have it all and others have nothing. So what if everyone could just stop running because there's nothing to chase, nothing to buy or to sell, no salary to negotiate for, nothing to compare yourself to, and nothing to worry about. Instead, people are just asked to work to the maximum of their abilities and receive according to their needs. For this to work, people must trade in their freedom, their individuality, and ambition and submit to the will of the collective, which is determined by the state. The individual must become a cog within the system.
Unfortunately, when you take away the chance to rise above the pack, human nature doesn't feel satiated. They don't feel happy. Instead, you actually unlock a new level of apathy from each according to his ability and to each according to his need is the rallying cry of communism. And the practical impact of that is that the more capable you seem, the more burden of labor is heaped on your shoulders versus what you get in return. Stay at the communal average. The strong must plow more. The clever must meet higher quotas. The diligent have to do everyone else's work. So essentially ability becomes a curse and victimhood behavior becomes a survival strategy. The less you can do or really convince other people you can't do, the lighter your load. So quickly a sprained ankle becomes a permanent limp and a bad yield is justified with thousands of excuses and a long sa story, but still wins a person extra grain from the collective silo. So in a system like this, the losers are those who have too much self-respect to calm the system, but then they're rewarded with having to bear the full load of sustaining that flawed system. The winners are those who learn to hide their strength and lean into victim behavior. This is how the promise of a utopia of dignity turns people into beggars, stripped of pride, purpose, or the will to rise. All because of one single belief that is etched on any human heart. Why should I work hard if I don't get to see the rewards of my hard work?
In the communist worldview, however, this type of thinking is tantamount to treason. And this brings us to why communism inevitably turns into a totalitarian system. Since creating equality means going up against human nature, implementation of this utopia vision requires the crushing of human ambition, and self-interest. The moment someone saves more or hides resources from their neighbor, the system flags them as a threat to the collective average. In Mao's communes, the hardest working peasants were denounced as the new bgeoisi and sent to re-education camps, which were really just hard labor camps. Their land and livestock were confiscated and merged into massive state-run collective farms, and citizens were expected to report anyone who saved extra grain or showed signs of bourgeoa ambition. In the Soviet Union, even small acts of enterprise like selling vegetables you grew from your own garden were branded as profiteering and led to being arrested. In East Germany, the Stacey built one of the most intrusive surveillance states in history. Not to stop crime, but to root out anyone who dared think independently or strive beyond the collective.
When the state's highest goal is equality, success becomes the enemy. Individuality becomes the enemy. So to maintain this fragile illusion of fairness, communist regimes have to control every aspect of life. How people work, how they earn, what they even think. And of course, the only way to do this is at the point of a gun. Hence the totalitarianism. Communism has resulted in the death of at least 100 million people from 1917 to 1991.
Despite communism's catastrophic failures, communism remains the great utopian dream for many people. And I think it's because they imagine that it would be run by people like themselves or at least how they think of themselves. Fair, honest, kind. But communism doesn't reward kindness. It rewards control. It's a system that gives absolute power to whoever is ruthless enough to eliminate all the idealists and claim the power for themselves. In that ruthless climb to the top, many who begin as wideeyed altruists transform into power-hungry vengeance demons. After all, power shows the man.
It's in a free and fair society where effort is rewarded and deceit is punished that people can truly engage with each other with civility. When those guardrails fall off, so do the mass of our civilized selves. But of course, our fair and free society has its problems. It's full of restless and dissatisfied people teameming with envy, acutely aware of what others have and what they lack. It's that very unhappiness, whether it's for themselves or the less fortunate, that draws people towards communism. The promise is very seductive. If there's no inequality, nothing to own, nothing to lose, no competition, no struggle, wouldn't we all be much happier than we are in this perpetual capitalist rat race? Wouldn't we finally be free of our misery?
Yes, inequality in a free society can make us unhappy because there's always someone better, richer, smarter. But take that inequality away and you actually take away the path to happiness. Comparison is the theft of joy, but it's also the spark of growth. Without contrast, there is no aspiration. Without aspiration, there's no meaning. Real happiness doesn't come from having nothing to chase. And it doesn't come from getting handouts, either. This is why we should never be jealous of nepo babies, because they're actually languishing in the shadows of their parents, and they're filling that void with meaningless luxuries. They have everything to live with, but nothing to live for.
Thomas Jefferson understood this when he wrote that our inalienable rights were life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Why didn't he just write happiness? Why the pursuit of happiness? He like Aristotle before him understood that happiness is found in activity, in striving toward virtue and purpose. Virtue and purpose are important here. He wasn't talking about pursuing a Birkin bag. Not in comfort, not in equality of outcome, but in the pursuit itself lies the path of happiness. The pursuit and not the reward is what gives life meaning. The reason that every communist regime collapses into stagnation, starvation, and control is because it robs people of that opportunity for that pursuit. It strips them of the chance to strive, to create, to become. It kills not just the body, but the very spirit that makes life worth living.
Thank you so much for watching. If you missed my last video where I talk about the epidemic of fatherlessness, you can click right here to watch the video. Or if you're more interested in checking out the lies that feminism has sold people, you can watch that video right here.