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New York City socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani is back in his element. After admitting that he cannot fulfill his campaign pledge to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mamdani returned to his class warfare narrative. This week, he taunted the city’s highest-earning taxpayers with a letter informing them of another special tax awaiting them in the Big Apple.
As wealthy citizens flee the city, Mamdani strongly suggests that those who remain are going to get burned by his promised “warmth of collectivism.” In doing so, he repeated a socialist myth about how the wealthiest taxpayers are not paying “their fair share.”
Mamdani went on X to tell those with second homes in New York City worth more than $5 million that “you’ve got mail” and a “new pied-a-terre tax.” He gleefully declared, “The best city in the world deserves the best parks, libraries, and schools in the world. That’s only possible when we all pay our fair share.”
The fair share myth is a virtual mantra among socialist and Democratic leaders, from Mamdani to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). In my book, “Rage and the Republic,” I address the false claim that the wealthy are not “paying their fair share.” In fact, the top 10 percent already pay more taxes than the bottom 90 percent combined.
In 2023, the top 1 percent paid an estimated 38.4 percent of all federal individual income taxes. One can certainly raise the need for additional taxes to support public works, but it is simple demagoguery to claim that the wealthy do not pay their fair share when the top 10 percent pay an estimated 75 percent of federal income taxes. The U.S. income tax system is already the most progressive in the developed world, even before additional New York state and city taxes are added in.
Another common fable has been repeated by socialists such as Darializa Avila Chevalier, the prison abolitionist who won a recent primary for Congress in New York. This radical, who once boasted how she wiped her hands on the American flag in lieu of a napkin, was pressed on whether there has ever been a “successful model of socialism anywhere in the world outside the U.S., in terms of both human rights and widespread economic justice.”
She responded by citing Sweden and Norway, as other figures such as Sanders have done before her. Indeed, the claim of successful Scandinavian socialist systems is a sort of Marxist bedtime fairytale, told to children about a workers’ paradise in quaint Nordic fishing villages.
But Sweden’s experience only shows the limits of socialism even in a relatively small nation. Decades ago, after disastrous results to its economy, Sweden turned away from the very kind of socialist theories increasingly fashionable in the U.S. today.
Norway has large public welfare systems, it is true. But there is a very specific reason for that: It has enormous direct oil revenues supporting a very small population. The Norwegian state produces about 120 barrels of oil for every man, woman and child living in the country. If the U.S. could produce that much oil per person through a state-controlled entity, it would be more oil than the entire world produces today and worth enough money to replace all federal individual and corporate income tax revenue.
In truth, countries like Denmark and Sweden strongly embrace capitalist principles today. They are listed among the most capitalist nations on Earth — in some rankings ahead of the U.S.
Indeed, many of their leaders have expressed disbelief or amusement at longstanding claims by American leftists about their being socialist nations. In 2015, Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen observed, “I know that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”
Likewise, the former Swedish Social Democratic Minister of Finance Kjell‐Olof Feldt said, “That whole thing with democratic socialism was absolutely impossible. It just didn’t work.”
But to candidates eager to prove their revolutionary bona fides, none of that matters. Even mainstream hopefuls such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) are now making the bizarre claim that capitalism is no longer working. It also does not matter that, in supporting Mamdani’s new tax, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) heralded how it could raise $500 million, despite reports showing a loss of billions in annual revenue as wealthy taxpayers flee the state.
Amid a rash of capital flight, many ask why Mamdani would want to continue taunting the wealthy and portraying them as freeloaders. The fact is, wherever it gets a foothold, socialism becomes self-perpetuating. Wherever ruinous policies destroy an economy, demand increases for government services and welfare. Citizens become more dependent on government as wealth is diminished.
The most vivid example of the new socialist fabulism came this week from the new British prime minister, Andy Burnham. He declared that he wants to restore the policies of 40 years ago, before the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher.
In his own version of promising the “warmth of collectivism,” Burnham declared, “The country surrendered control of the essentials — housing, water, energy, transport — and left people exposed to higher costs.”
Burnham’s account leaves out that the supposed golden age under Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan, which he was referencing, led in 1977 to the so-called “winter of discontent.” Those policies destroyed the British economy, and the nation was faced with the humiliation of being rescued by the International Monetary Fund as if it were some banana republic.
With a record like that, it is little surprise Mamdani and his allies prefer to focus on socialist mythologies rather than realities.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”