As New York approaches its 2025 mayoral election, two very different candidates reveal the same underlying problem – a political system that keeps producing inadequate choices.
I haven’t followed the New York mayoral race closely. I’ll admit a degree of apathy; what happens there doesn’t affect my day-to-day life. But the emergence of Zohran Mamdani has piqued my interest.
Watching the campaigns in their final moments, it is difficult to see either candidate – Mamdani or former governor Andrew Cuomo – as a credible answer to the city’s problems. One speaks in moral absolutes and revolutionary language; the other appeals to experience and order. Each represents a familiar type. Together they tell us something about the system that keeps producing such limited choices.
Zohran Mamdani is the easier of the two to describe. He speaks the language of moral urgency: housing as a right, groceries as a public good, wealth as a resource to be redistributed. It is an agenda built from slogans that sound unarguable until tested. Each begins with a real problem: unaffordable housing, exploitative markets, widening inequality.
Yet the proposed remedies rely on a kind of economic idealism that treats the city as a moral project rather than a living, self-correcting system.
His signature policies show the gap between moral intent and administrative reality. The proposal for city-run grocery stores is framed as a remedy for ‘food deserts’, but history offers few examples of governments running efficient retail systems. The economic implications are extensive.
Fiscal cost is the first: establishing and operating retail outlets would require capital outlay for real estate, logistics, staffing, and supply contracts – costs that would rival or exceed the margins of the very small businesses these stores are meant to complement. Competitive distortion follows: publicly funded stores could undercut independent grocers who operate without subsidies, leading to contraction in the private sector, especially in low-margin neighbourhoods. Labour implications are no less serious.
Drive fixed costs upward
Unionised public-sector wages and benefits would drive fixed costs upward; if prices are capped for affordability, deficits would follow. And supply-chain rigidity means city agencies would struggle to adapt to price shocks in fuel, transport, or produce, producing chronic shortages or a permanent reliance on subsidies.
Beyond the economics lie the familiar political and administrative risks. City-run ventures tend to become vehicles for patronage, appointments, and opaque contracting. Pilot schemes rarely stay pilots; once created, they become politically difficult to close.
Mission creep is almost guaranteed. ‘Ensuring access’ slides into price control, and the state drifts from supplementing the market to competing with it.
Advocates cite examples from Europe and Latin America where municipal food markets operate sustainably in limited contexts, and Chicago’s recent exploration of a public grocery pilot shows the idea entering US policy debate.
But those cases rely on cooperative or hybrid models – not the fully state-owned approach Mamdani has described. If moral ambition is the driving force, administrative realism appears an afterthought.
His housing agenda follows the same moral pattern. Mamdani supports extending rent stabilisation and, in some cases, freezing rents in specific categories of housing. The rhetoric is clear: housing is a human right rather than a market commodity. It is a morally attractive idea, but one that treats the housing market as an area of morality rather than capacity.
In the short term, tenants under control benefit: predictable rent, protection from eviction, and political reassurance that someone is ‘standing up to landlords’. The optics are strong, but the economics are not.
Hesitate to build
Over time, supply contracts. Developers hesitate to build when future returns are capped, and construction migrates toward unregulated or luxury segments. Landlords under price ceilings defer maintenance, since repairs do not pay for themselves. Informal subletting and ‘key-money’ payments emerge, recreating the inequality the policy is meant to cure.
The beneficiaries are often not the poor but the long-established middle class, shielded by legacy leases while newcomers face soaring market rents. Empirical evidence bears this out: Berlin’s 2020 freeze cut rental listings by nearly half before the courts struck it down; studies from San Francisco and Cambridge show long-run declines in housing stock; New York’s own experience has produced a two-tier market of protected incumbents and priced-out entrants.
The irony is structural. Rent control protects the incumbent poor but harms the aspiring poor. It fixes the symptom, affordability, while worsening the disease – undersupply. Mamdani’s instinct to shield the vulnerable is understandable, but the mechanism corrodes the very system that produces new housing. The likely outcome is permanent shortage, declining mobility, and a shadow market of favours and loopholes masquerading as justice.
The third pillar of Mamdani’s platform is the call to ‘tax the rich,’ the broadly accepted moral equation of ‘rich people = evil’. It is presented not as class warfare but as moral correction – asking the wealthy and large corporations to pay their ‘fair share’ to fund social programmes like free transit, childcare, and housing.
Ethical clarity
The intention is politically effective: it creates a sense of ethical clarity in a debate otherwise buried in spreadsheets. Yet the economics are less stable than the rhetoric. New York already carries one of the highest combined state and city tax burdens in the country. Its tax base is unusually concentrated, with a small fraction of high earners and major firms contributing a disproportionate share of municipal revenue.
These are also the most mobile taxpayers, able to relocate within or beyond the tri-state area with minimal friction.
IRS migration data suggest that even small tax increases can influence relocation among top earners, a trend that appeared to accelerate after 2020. The arithmetic is simple: revenue equals rate times base, and if the base shrinks faster than the rate rises, total yield declines.
Firms respond in similar fashion, shifting operations or headquarters elsewhere, reducing local investment, and eroding the very revenue the policy seeks to expand. Short-term gains in political capital may follow – proof of ‘standing up to the rich’ – but the long-term consequence is fiscal instability and potential credit deterioration if outflow persists.
The real danger isn’t financial, it’s cultural. When taxation becomes moral payback instead of civic duty, it widens the gap between aspiration and resentment. A smarter path would be progressive taxes that stay competitive: small surcharges linked to visible benefits like public transport, vacancy taxes on empty luxury homes, and tighter enforcement of existing laws. Those ideas connect ethics with results. Mamdani connects ethics with symbolism – and in fiscal policy, symbolism is a luxury few cities can afford.
Revealing
Mamdani’s contradictions are as revealing as his policies. He voted for a substantial legislative pay raise that boosted salaries overnight – the largest in the chamber’s history – undercutting the image of a working-class crusader.
Nor is he exactly a man of the people. Reports of dinners at places like Omen Sushi – a minimalist, high-end Kyoto restaurant in Manhattan where a modest meal costs more than many of his constituents spend on groceries for a week – don’t amount to scandal, but they jar with the image of an everyman reformer.
His communication style compounds the problem. He often speaks in sprawling, impressionistic sentences—half moral philosophy, half activist jargon; some may even call it word salad. Asked a direct question, he tends to answer with atmosphere: phrases about liberation, solidarity, or ‘systems of harm’, all loosely tethered to policy.
It gives the impression of depth while avoiding specificity. The same habit surfaces in his reluctance to condemn slogans celebrating jihad or the intifada. When pressed repeatedly, he defaults to a familiar trope – that he does not wish to ‘police’ people’s speech – which sounds principled but functions as evasion.
The hesitation matters less for its foreign-policy content than for what it signals about temperament: a preference for moral theatre over moral clarity. In an age when language can mobilise as easily as it can justify, ambiguity is not neutrality, it is calculation.
Mamdani’s supporters see nuance; his critics see opportunism. He is articulate, intelligent, and untested in high-level administration. The question is whether that ambiguity stems from intellectual caution or from a reluctance to alienate the ideological coalition that sustains him. Either way, it weakens his claim to be a reformer guided by principle.
Establishment’s answer
Cuomo is, in many ways, the establishment’s answer to Mamdani: experienced, pragmatic, and familiar. He projects steadiness rather than inspiration, offering competence where others offer conviction. His record as governor remains substantial: infrastructure investment, tenant protections, fiscal discipline, and a reputation for managerial control that bordered on obsession.
Even his critics concede he understands how the machinery of government works. Yet that familiarity is double-edged.
The same decisiveness that once gave him authority also produced the secrecy, coercion, and personal misconduct that ended his career. The allegations of sexual harassment – numerous, credible, and confirmed through investigation – were not an aberration; they reflected a political culture he had come to personify: one where loyalty was enforced, dissent punished, and moral accountability treated as a nuisance – a style of leadership more Trumpian than he may care to admit.
Cuomo’s platform is deliberately modest. He promises what he once delivered: affordable housing through public–private partnerships, investment in transit and infrastructure, and fiscal restraint to restore confidence in the city’s finances. As governor, he expanded tenant protections through the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, raised the minimum wage, and introduced paid family leave: social outcomes that Mamdani now calls for, achieved without the moral theatre that accompanies them today.
Pattern is consistent
His administration also legalised same-sex marriage and advanced gun control legislation, not out of ideological zeal but through calculated political sequencing. The pattern is consistent: progressive ends by technocratic means.
His current message reflects that legacy. He offers predictability in a time of fatigue: competent management over moral confrontation, order over improvisation. On crime, he emphasises enforcement and inter-agency coordination; on business, he pledges stability and low-risk governance. It is an agenda designed to reassure rather than inspire, aimed at those who want the city to function, not to transform.
Cuomo’s strength has always been control. His admirers call it discipline; his detractors call it domination. The same command of process that allowed him to pass difficult legislation also created a culture of fear and compliance. Staff turnover was high, loyalty was compulsory, and dissent was treated as betrayal.
Decision-making was concentrated around a small circle of trusted aides, producing efficiency in the short term and dysfunction in the long one. The investigations that ended his tenure – credible findings of harassment, manipulation of subordinates, and suppression of inconvenient data – were symptoms of that same reflex. Power, for Cuomo, is not a means but a method.
Even his own success became a business. During the pandemic he published a memoir about his ‘leadership lessons’, earning more than five million dollars while using state staff to help prepare it. The deal was technically legal, but ethically corrosive. It confirmed what critics had long suspected – that his public service had become indistinguishable from self-promotion. His managerial competence is real, but so is the moral fatigue it conceals.
Cuomo’s appeal lies in familiarity. To a weary electorate, he embodies the comfort of known quantities – the belief that experience, however tainted, is safer than improvisation. In a sense, he is the institutional immune response to figures like Mamdani: a professional class reasserting its claim to competence after a decade of populist volatility.
Reveals the pathology
Yet his career also reveals the pathology of that same establishment. Bureaucratic efficiency becomes moral insulation; measurable outcomes substitute for trust. His successes in housing, infrastructure, and labour reform prove that government can still work, but the manner of their achievement – coercive, transactional, and self-referential – shows why voters stopped believing in the people who run it. He is what a broken system produces when it tries to fix itself with the same tools that broke it.
Mamdani and Cuomo form a near-perfect symmetry. One speaks as though politics were a branch of ethics; the other behaves as though it were a branch of management. Both reduce government to a single function – virtue or control – and both mistake their function for the whole.
Mamdani’s socialism promises fairness through intervention, but it overlooks the administrative competence required to make intervention work. Cuomo’s technocracy promises stability through expertise, but it drains politics of moral meaning. The result is a politics that alternates between indignation and exhaustion, between the language of redemption and the language of spreadsheets. Voters are left choosing not between good and bad ideas, but between two incomplete versions of the same broken logic.
If this is what New York’s democracy now produces – moralists without plans and managers without conviction – then as the city heads toward its November 2025 election, it may be time to ask whether the problem lies not in the candidates, but in the system that keeps making them.
[Image: Michael Discenza on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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