When An Ideologue Says Capitalism Is Theft, Expect Years Of Hardship For His Constituency

By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

“When @NYGovCuomo refuses to tax the rich, he’s refusing to let workers enjoy the wealth they created,” wrote Zohran Mamdani in the lead up to his election.

“When he says low taxes foster a ‘business-friendly environment,’ he means an environment where it’s easy for bosses to steal from workers,” continued the candidate.

“Taxation isn’t theft. Capitalism is.”

It’s a rather extraordinary statement. Particularly so for the Mayor of New York, which for a century has been capitalism’s capital city.

Mamdani’s quote falls comfortably within the Karl Marx genre, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” Or George Orwell’s, “Four legs good, two legs bad.”

Mamdani won the youth vote by the kind of electoral margin that would’ve made Saddam Hussein blush. And when an ideologue says capitalism is theft, you should (1) believe that he means what he says, and (2) expect it to take years of economic hardship for his constituency to come to their senses.

Argentina’s chronic decline started sometime after Peron came to power in the 1940s. Milei chain sawed his way to economic sanity 80 years later.

Anyhow, 1500 miles southwest of New York City, in Austin Texas, 75% of Tesla shareholders voted to award Elon a $1 trillion incentive package. It is contingent on a variety of milestones being met, the most ambitious of which is a 6x rise in Tesla market capitalization to $8.5 trillion.

It was an Ayn Randian sort of result, and sure to attract more NYC refugees to the Lone Star state.

Progressives naturally erupted. Which kicked off a furious but healthy philosophical exchange on X about the makers in society versus the takers.

And whether we should think of economic spoils as a fixed pool to be divided by politicians, or something to be inexorably expanded by free market capitalism.

It is a debate Orwell hoped to settle in Animal Farm’s final chapter, when the pigs replaced their seven idealistic founding principles with one simple line, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”