One line from Zohran Mamdani’s inaugural address from a couple of weeks ago has been getting a lot of attention. It goes like this: “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
Does he mean the communal warmth of Stalin’s work camps in Siberia? Or maybe he means the literal heat of a jail cell in Nicolas Maduro’s socialist paradise in Venezuela.
And anyway, where is all this rugged individualism that Mamdani wants to irradicate with all that warmth? Don’t we have enough collectivism already? In an oped that appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal on January 11th, Jonah Goldberg comments on Zohran Mamdani’s call for still more redistribution: “Maybe it’s bad that the top 10% of American tax filers make nearly half of the income in America — and provide three-quarters of the income tax revenues. Maybe it’s good that the average wage earner will receive more in entitlements than they paid in. Maybe it’s right that the poorest 20% of Americans receive roughly $6 from the government for every dollar they pay in taxes. Perhaps we should be ashamed that we spend less than France on social welfare programs but more than Switzerland and the Netherlands. Reasonable people will differ.”
Of course he means to imply that any reasonable person would agree that taxes are high enough and that there’s already plenty of collectivism and redistribution going around.
It seems to me that we could use a little more rugged individualism in this country. Less blaming of society for one’s failings and more acceptance of personal responsibility. And, by the way, that goes just as much for MAGA world, which blames everything on immigrants, as it does for the hard-left which blames everything on “the one percent” or white, European, colonialist oppressors. After all, who spends more time whining about how he’s been mistreated by everyone else than Donald Trump?
Now, I’ve never thought that libertarianism made any sense at all. Modern life is impossible without lots of cooperation, coordination, group effort. That means government, corporations, organizations. It means committee meetings and HR departments. Can’t avoid it.
But there is a continuum along which I think we’ve already gone too far. I think taxes are too high. I think the hard-left wants to force too much community on everybody — and communities that are run by their own oppressive rules. So, I think it’s useful to push back against that. I don’t want to abolish government or make it, as the anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist once described, “small enough to drown in a bath tub.” But I do want it to be efficient and not a single bureaucrat bigger than it absolutely has to be.
I also don’t believe that an unfettered free market has the answer to every problem. I’m for sensible regulation that protects workers and the environment and the free market itself, which can collapse on itself like the end of a game of Monopoly. But again, a little bit of regulation goes a long way. A light, efficient touch is all that’s needed.
So, when comrade Mamdani invites me to warm myself by the glow of the stove in the gulag, I’ll thank him, but decline.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 