Last week, a reel by Zohran Mamdani popped up on my phone as I was scrolling through it between meetings. It was a short, well-edited, engaging video with a message that sounded reasonable—if you didn’t stop to think about who would pay for what he was proposing.
More than the content itself, what caught my attention was the mechanics behind it, because Mamdani and his team have managed to produce content that spreads quickly on social media and have built a digital infrastructure that converts those views into organizing people, raising funds, and maintaining an active political structure even after the algorithm stops favoring a video.
It’s the old organizational model of paper sign-up sheets, updated with digital tools that multiply its reach. As an entrepreneur, I recognize and respect that in terms of operational efficiency. What I cannot respect is what that well-constructed apparatus is selling.
Mamdani is the mayor of New York, and alongside figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, he represents the most significant advance social democracy has made within the Democratic Party in decades. His proposals include rent control, the construction of public housing, and tax increases on high incomes and corporations. This agenda is gaining support and taking over areas that have historically been the domain of the private sector, doing so with greater efficiency and better results for everyone.
From my perspective as an entrepreneur, the primary problem with this agenda is fiscal. Funding public supermarkets, public housing, and transportation requires a tax burden that ultimately falls on businesses and those who generate wealth. That capital which the state extracts in the form of taxes is capital that is not reinvested in innovation, that is not allocated to hiring talent, and that does not flow toward sectors where the market identifies real opportunities. Countries that have followed this path have respectable welfare systems and economies that grow at a fraction of the rate of the U.S. economy. A country that built its greatness on economic freedom, private property, and individual responsibility cannot afford to trade that model for one that Europe has been trying to sustain for decades with debatable success.
The second problem is one of incentives, and it affects something that is in this country’s DNA. The United States built its position as a world power on a culture where individual effort is directly rewarded, where those who take risks can reap a proportional benefit, and where social mobility depends on one’s own decisions, not on the generosity of a government program.
The third problem is one of identity, and it is the one that concerns me the most in the long term. Moving the United States closer to the European model of social democracy means leaving behind the principles upon which the American system was built. Economic freedom, private property, and individual responsibility are not values this country inherited by chance; they are the conditions that made it possible for a 250-year-old nation to become the economy that sets the technological, financial, and productive course for the rest of the world.
Replacing those foundations with a model based on the expansion of the state, the construction of public housing, and rent control means betting on policies whose costs have already been laid bare in various countries. I see no reason for the United States to decide to follow that same path. That bet may win elections, but whether it generates prosperity is another story.
