Opinion
A funny thing happened on the way to the Big Apple’s socialist utopia: Zohran Mamdani discovered deregulation.
The democratic socialist mayor of New York, who campaigned on rent freezes, free buses, and city-owned grocery stores, has apparently learned that sometimes government itself is the problem.
In July, Mamdani unveiled “OPEN for Small Business,” a package of more than 50 reforms aimed at cutting paperwork, eliminating outdated permits, and reducing some of the fines and fees faced by New York’s roughly 180,000 small businesses.
Among the proposed changes are plans to eliminate a separate permit for restaurants that serve frozen desserts, get rid of a redundant license affecting bodegas, lengthen certain license-renewal periods, and make it easier to win approval for sidewalk cafés.
In announcing the initiative, Mamdani complained about “the paperwork and the inconsistency” that small-business owners encounter when dealing with city government.
Welcome to the club, Zohran. Conservatives have been saying this for decades.
Every permit, regulation, and bureaucratic delay carries a cost. Someone ultimately has to pay for it, whether it is the business owner, the employee, or the customer.
And that burden does not fall evenly. Large corporations can hire lawyers, compliance officers, and consultants to navigate city hall. The neighborhood restaurant or family-run store usually cannot. For them, every extra form, fee, and delay is not an abstraction; it is another reason not to expand, hire, or even stay in business.
This is not exactly a revolutionary concept. Unless, perhaps, you are a democratic socialist.
Nor has Mamdani confined his newfound enthusiasm for cutting red tape to small business.
Earlier this year, his administration announced reforms intended to speed up affordable-housing construction by reducing the amount of time projects spend navigating the city’s approval process. According to Leila Bozorg, deputy mayor for housing and planning, some of the changes could cut months or years from the time it takes to get housing built.
“These delays are not inevitable,” Mamdani said. “They are the result of broken systems.”
Indeed they are.
But those broken systems did not descend from the heavens. They were built by politicians and government agencies, one burdensome regulation, permit, and requirement at a time. The result is a system that makes it needlessly difficult to operate.
Mamdani’s solution is to remove some of those barriers. Fair enough.
And yet, the mayor who now acknowledges that regulation can hurt small businesses continues to champion a far larger role for government in the economy.
What Mamdani fails to grasp is that government has a remarkable talent for creating problems and then presenting itself as the solution.
It makes housing more difficult and expensive to build and then responds with subsidies. It buries businesses under fees and paperwork and then creates programs to help them navigate the maze it created.
The point is not that government has no legitimate role. Restaurants need health standards and buildings need safety codes. But there is a difference between necessary safeguards and rules that simply make it harder to build or do business.
Mamdani’s reforms implicitly acknowledge that distinction. But they hardly amount to an ideological conversion. He has not become Milton Friedman with a Queens accent.
So he will eliminate a permit here and speed up an approval there before declaring victory over red tape—all while continuing to push an agenda that would give the government greater influence over rents, transportation, childcare, food, and other parts of daily life.
Call it socialism with fewer forms.
On Jan. 11, 1989, Ronald Reagan addressed the larger question in his farewell address to the nation.
“I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited,” Reagan said. “There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
Mamdani wants to show that big government works.
He may yet end up proving why New York needs less of it.
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