New York City is the most expensive city in the United States because the high demand for limited space drives up costs for housing, goods, and services, right?
Well, not exactly. While it’s true that high demand and limited space impact any city’s cost of living, the adoption of Marxist policies are heavily to blame for the unaffordability crisis in NYC.
“Why is New York City so expensive? It has the highest taxes in the country. … It has more regulations than anybody can keep track of,” Mark Levin says.
The city’s effort to make living more affordable via rent controls has only made matters worse because developers opt to “build more luxury [residences] … to bypass the rent control and to sell to wealthy people,” making “housing for people who have average incomes less and less affordable and in some areas unaffordable,” he explains.
As for the exorbitant cost of food in NYC, taxes — “taxes on the people who sell the food, taxes on restaurants, taxes on delicatessens and pizzerias” — are to blame, Levin says. Other government-imposed factors, specifically regulations and labor requirements such as high minimum wages, prevent would-be business owners from entering the market.
Levin finds it ironic that the very government policies — like rent controls and high minimum wages — that are imposed to make the city more affordable are actually what make NYC so expensive.
Unfortunately, New Yorkers can’t seem to connect the dots, which is why they continue electing people like Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic mayoral candidate who’s an open socialist. He’s proposing stricter rent controls and an even higher minimum wage, as well as city-owned grocery stores and free public transportation, among other Marxist policies. He’s even expressed his desire to “seize the means of production” — an idea that “comes straight out of the ‘Communist Manifesto.’”
Many of these voters buy into the false narrative that it’s capitalism and billionaires making life unaffordable, when in fact it’s capitalism that gives us freedom to ascend in the ranks and puts the power of destiny in our hands.
“Capitalism is a godsend,” Levin says, but “for the Marxists, it must be destroyed.”
Mamdani and others like him sell a vision of a “workers’ paradise” where affordability is no longer an issue, but the reality of that vision is a society where “individualism and freedom” are treated like “poison.” It’s a world where “the family, the church, [and] the synagogue” are seen as “competing social structures” that need to be “annihilated.” The people who previously “created the wealth” are disincentivized to do the very things that led to wealth, so they move away.
This is the fate of New York City if Mamdani comes into power, Levin warns.
To hear more of his analysis and commentary, watch the clip above.
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