Zohran Mamdani has now overtaken Gavin Newsom and Kim Jong-un as the world’s most high-profile socialist.

And that’s not a good thing if you’re a socialist. Because even by the standards of a socialist, he has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. Watch what he says in response to a simple question about how he’s going to fund his free buses.

[From video]

And the other one talking about fast and free buses and you’re meeting with the governor. I’ve heard you talk about many times that you don’t want to take money away from the MTA. You want to put money back in. It’s something that she agrees with, right? We don’t want to take away money from the MTA. How are you getting that money, the 700 million to make the buses free into the MCA if she’s not for raising taxes?

[From video]

You know, I think that the two clearest ways to raise that money is through the raising of the state’s corporate tax to match up New Jersey. I think that a lot of this is still a case to be made, whether it’s the corporate tax or it’s the personal income tax on those who make more than a million dollars a year or more. I think that these are the clearest ways. I’ve also said that if there are other ways to raise this funding, the most important fact is that we fund it. Not the question of how we do it, but that we do it. [End video]

It’s not about how we do it, but that we do it. Yeah. Okay. But how? Now, a sensible leader would look at their own budget to find savings elsewhere to then send the money to where it’s needed or wanted. But no. That’s not the socialist way. Credit where it’s due, Mamdani is a true socialist. Right out of the gate, he’s insisting that other people, in this case, the taxpayers of the entire state of New York, should pay. For my Australian viewers who may not fully have understood his answer, because the terminology in the US is a little different, he’s literally saying that the governor of the state of New York should increase their state corporate taxes and fund the city of New York to afford its free buses. And this free bus idea is the cheapest of his hair brain ideas. He’s also said that he’s going to introduce city-run grocery stores, which if they are really as cheap as he claims, they’re going to be losing money constantly, costing untold billions. And another flagship policy is free child care for children under five at a cost of some $6 billion US a year. All in all, he’s talking flippantly about at least 10 billion US or more in spending every year to be paid for out of massive tax hikes on both the people of New York City and by begging for handouts from New York State.

It’s a recipe for disaster. And you know what? I’m here for it because Zohran Mamdani is about to provide the world with a high-profile cautionary tale all about just how quickly socialism goes wrong. But, and this is a very important but, he’s already getting his excuses lined up to explain why it went wrong. And of course, it’s going to be everyone’s fault but his own. No, no, no. It’s because the governor didn’t raise corporate taxes. It’s because the rich people left the city. It’s because orange man bad. We already know that the total failure of Mamdani as a New York City mayor will be everyone’s fault but his own. which means that if we’re going to use him as an example of what not to do, as we should, then we need to be ready with an answer for why it all went wrong. Specifically, we need to talk about why his ideas won’t work in advance so that we can point back to that when he and his fellow socialists, including any friends and family you may have who have mental illnesses. Sorry, who are socialists when they try and blame everyone but themselves for his failure.

But before we get to that, my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to cut through the crap, make sense of the nonsense, and to understand what’s going on in the world as it changes around us. Now, I’m 100% viewer supported, so please help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos, then you will love my books. They’re about government, power, perverse incentives that allow mediocre or even evil people to thrive in the murky world of politics, human rights, and civil disobedience. There’s my first book, Good People Break Bad Laws, all about civil disobedience in the modern age. Then there’s my second book, Good Christians Break Bad Laws, which is all about the theology of civil disobedience. And you’ll find both my books on Amazon, but you’ll also find them along with the DVD of my multi-award-winning documentary, Battleground Melbourne, and my t-shirts and hoodies in a range of different designs at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. And everything you buy will help me to keep the Topher project going. And we’re in the last few days before these five designs are discontinued, never to return. So, make sure you go over to goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com and grab yours whilst stocks last before they are discontinued on December 1st forever.

Okay, let me run you through exactly why we can confidently say that Zohran Mamdani’s policies will fail.

He’s got a bunch of different policies, but broadly speaking, they will all fail for the same reasons. So, I’m going to bunch them all together. Mamdani’s ideas will fail due to three key concepts. The elasticity of demand, jurisdictional competition, and the Laffer curve. Now, I’ve only got a few minutes, so I’ll touch on each one superficially, but enough so that you get the idea and so that you can explain these concepts to the idiots in your life. Elasticity of demand is simply what an economist calls it when people change their behavior based on changes in prices or other variables. And it’s not always an easy concept to grasp because one person’s elasticity will change depending on their demographics, their social status, and their personal finances and a host of other sort of psychosocial factors.

The mistake that socialists make is that they only tend to think one layer deep into the elasticity of demand and even then only when it suits them. Let me give you an example. Mamdani says that making buses free will increase how many people use the bus and that is almost certainly true but not in the way that he expects. He thinks that people will stop driving and they’ll use the bus instead. But the number of people who will do that will be very small. There will be some but remember anyone who’s driving well they’re already paying more than the cost of the bus to drive which means there must be a reason that they’re willing to pay that price already. Maybe they have things to carry. Or maybe the buses don’t go where they want to go. Or maybe they just don’t want to be on a city bus because ew. So, the buses being free probably won’t take a lot of cars off the road. Some, sure, but not a lot.

The people who will actually start using buses when they’re free are the people who are currently walking and especially homeless people. Mamdani becomes mayor on January 1st, the middle of winter in New York. And I promise you, it’ll be a matter of a few weeks at most before there is outcry because homeless people are using the warm buses as a place to sleep during the day. And bus drivers are going to be arcing up because they’re having to have fights and confrontations with homeless people who refuse to get off or who start taking up huge amounts of space inside the bus. But I can also promise you that Mamdani hasn’t thought that far ahead. He thinks that making buses free will reduce car traffic and turn New York into a clean green public transport machine.

But notice how Mamdani’s whole free buses idea is based on it depends on elasticity of demand. If I make it free, more people will use it. Now, hold that thought because if that’s true, then it must also be true that if you make child care free, more people will use that too. Another of Mamdani’s promises is this free child care for kids under five plan. Elasticity of demand says that if you drop the price, people will use it more. So, this five, six, excuse me, billion dollar US budget that he’s thinking that this policy will cost him. Well, that will be nothing compared to the actual cost because more people will start using this childcare cuz it’s free and the cost will skyrocket. But that’s just the money side. The second and third order effects will actually make it impossible for people to get child care in the first place once it’s free. Remember, I said that socialists, if they think about the elasticity of demand at all, tend to only think one layer deep.

So, let’s think through this child care policy a few layers deep, shall we? Layer one, you make it free.

Lots of parents who used to use other arrangements will then sign up for free child care. That’s true. But now layer two, all of a sudden there is no availability left because every spot is booked because parents pay no price for booking that spot. Now, layer three, because there’s no vacancy all of a sudden, there is no supply for parents who only use child care occasionally on an as needed basis. So, anyone willing to meet that need for occasional as-needed child care, well, they can now charge pretty much whatever they want because parents are desperate and there is no room left in the free ones.

And so, we get to layer four, a black market of unregulated, very expensive child care centers will quickly form, meeting the demand of desperate parents who used to be able to pay for occasional care in the normal system, but now they can’t get it from the regulated child care market. And on and on down the layers we go. This isn’t speculation, by the way. This is a direct prediction based on what happens every time a government gets involved in an industry like child care. This exact spiral has happened here in Australia. We have highly regulated and heavily subsidized child care and parents are struggling to find a place to get their kids in cuz it’s free or at least subsidized in Australia. Parents aren’t paying the full commercial rate for it, which means that they overdemand, they overuse, they use more of it than they otherwise would. This leads to a plethora of illegal child care centers where desperate parents are paying a fortune for dubious care.

The principle is this. When the government makes something free or cheap, it always goes from being expensive to being impossible to find at any price. And then whenever there’s big money to be made, the black market will provide. So, that’s elasticity of demand. Quite simply, Mamdani won’t be able to spend money fast enough to keep up with the demand for free child care. And as a result, a black market and quite possibly a turf war will soon follow. But of course, he won’t admit that that’s a failure of his policies. No, he’ll use the lack of vacancy and the emergence of this black market as proof that the government needs to do more.

Now the second issue, jurisdictional competition.

News flashes are Mamdani, people can move, especially in the United States of America. See, the US has 50 different states and their system of federalism is different to ours here in Australia. Every state and in fact every city can impose their own income taxes, land taxes, consumption taxes, you name it. So, jurisdictional competition in the USA is very high, which means that if you don’t like what they’re doing in your area, there are lots of other areas to choose from where they’re all doing different things. People like Mamdani presume that people won’t move out of New York if we tax them more. So, he’s increasing New York City taxes, the income tax on high income earners specifically, by more than 50% and he’s begging the governor of the state of New York to jack up their corporate income taxes as well and then hand that windfall over to the city of New York for him to spend.

The thing is in functional terms, what he’s actually doing is he’s offering people a financial incentive to leave. If where I live, if my city is saying, “Hey, you have to pay $200,000 extra if you want to live here.” Well, that’s functionally identical to my city saying, “I’ll pay you an extra $200,000 if you go and live somewhere else.” There’s no borders in the way in the US. There’s no passport needed. There’s no language barrier. There’s no currency exchange. Rich people can just up and move in literally a matter of days if they decide to. That’s jurisdictional competition. And it’s a beautiful thing. It’s one of the key reasons that I believe Australia should have more states and that most of the powers currently held by the Commonwealth should actually be in the hands of these much smaller states so, that if a state goes off the rails like what we’re seeing in Victoria right now or like what New York City is about to do, then it’s as easy as possible for people to vote with their feet.

And if Mamdani thinks rich people are just going to sit there paying these extra taxes and being demonized in the process, well, he is going to be partly right. For some people, they will choose to stay in New York regardless. But he’s also going to be partly wrong. In today’s highly connected world, both digitally, but also with highways and in the US with their airports absolutely everywhere, it’s no longer necessary for people to live in the big smoke to get or stay rich. People can live in Florida or South Dakota for that matter, wherever they want, and they can still be connected and do business with the whole world. I promise you, some of the millionaires and billionaires that Mamdani is depending on to fund his socialist dreams are simply going to leave. There’s a reason why socialist countries usually end up with walls around them, and it’s not because capitalists are trying to get in. But again, Mamdani will have his narrative all lined up. Those evil capitalists weren’t willing to pay their fair share. Wrong. They were already paying more than their fair share and they refused to be taken to the cleaners.

Okay. Final issue. And this one actually comes out of the first two issues. The final issue is the Laffer curve.

The Laffer curve is named after a guy Laffer who realized that there comes a point where increasing tax rates leads to a reduction in tax revenue. Let’s talk this through. If you tax everyone at 100%. then you’ll get no revenue because no one will work. Who’s going to go and earn money if 100% of it is just going to be taken away? You can tax your economy at 100% if you want, 100% of the GDP, but there will be no GDP to tax. But at the other end, if you tax everyone at 0%, you’ll also raise no tax revenue for obvious reasons. So, that means that somewhere in between those two extremes is a tax rate that generates maximum tax revenue.

Now, I’m putting aside the fact that taxation is extortion and there’s no such thing as a good tax. I’m looking at this purely from the point of view of a big spending socialist who simply wants to maximize the amount of money that he gets to spend. Now, lots of studies have been done to try and figure out what the ideal tax rate might be, the tax rate that maximizes tax revenue, the peak of the Laffer curve. And the simple fact is that it depends on a bunch of variables and each situation will be unique. But most researchers tend to agree that it’s between about 25% and maybe 33% most of the time. Now, I actually disagree. I think that it’s only that high because it’s assumed that the other surrounding jurisdictions are also relatively high taxing. If instead you made the assumption that there was a genuinely low tax jurisdiction available for people to move to, then thanks to jurisdictional competition, I think the peak of the Laffer curve would be somewhere between 13 and 15%. But that’s an argument for another day.

The point is there is a peak and all Western countries, the USA included, are already well above the peak of the Laffer curve, which means that if you increase taxes even further, then tax revenues will actually decline and not increase. How can that be? Well, because people respond to incentives. This is just the elasticity of demand all over again. I spent 7 years working in a warehouse and I know blokes who refused to do overtime even though they needed the money because it would push them into a higher tax bracket. So, even though their overtime pay was more than their normal pay, their actual take-home pay from each hour of overtime wouldn’t increase. So, they just clocked off and went home, leaving the overtime to me, which was great. But that’s an example of people responding to incentives. The change in tax bracket as their income increased thanks to these overtime hours was enough to make them go, “Eh, I can’t be bothered.”

Now, everyone’s threshold for that’s going to be different. I was perfectly happy to keep working regardless of the tax bracket thresholds, but that’s the point of the Laffer curve. The higher you raise taxes, the higher the percentage of people who go meh. Or alternatively, if they run a business or they have the option of going elsewhere or really any options at all, you increase the amount of effort and energy that people are willing to go to in order to minimize their taxes. Remember that Zohran Mamdani is looking to increase taxes on wealthy people with incomes in excess of a million dollars a year. These are people who can afford to move. He’s also looking at taxes on corporations with revenue in excess of $5 billion a year. Now, only a handful of those corporations or wealthy income earners need to move to put a serious dent in his tax revenue. More people will move, more people will register their company elsewhere. More people will use a range of tax strategies, legal or otherwise, to reduce their bill. And so your overall revenue actually goes down even though the tax rate went up if you’re already above the Laffer maximum.

So, Mamdani’s New York socialist experiment is going to fail for these three reasons.

The elasticity of demand, jurisdictional competition, and the Laffer curve, which is really just a practical outworking of those first two. I could do a whole video on his hair brain city-owned grocery store idea. And for those of you playing the drinking game at home, you’d better believe I would be talking about Venezuela in such a video, but that will have to wait for another day. We need to start talking about the impending failure of Zohran Mamdani’s socialist New York now before the failures become obvious. So, that when the failures become obvious and Mamdani and his fellow useful idiots try and blame everyone but themselves, we can point to this video and you can point to the conversations that you will have already had with your socialist friends and family and say, “No, mate. This is exactly what I said was going to happen.”

Mamdani winning in New York is a wonderful opportunity to show people, young and old, not only that socialism doesn’t work, but why socialism doesn’t work. My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and I help busy people like you to cut through the crap, make sense of the nonsense, and keep up with the world as it changes around you. I am 100% viewer supported. So, if you’ve learned something new, or if I’ve given you just better ways of explaining things that you already knew in this video, then please support my work by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. Check out my books, DVDs, and merch at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. And remember, I’m discontinuing five of my designs at the end of November. So, grab anything you like before time runs out at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

Thank you so much for watching to the end. The algorithm loves you and so do I. Please like, comment, subscribe,

And as always, think free.