I want to challenge an idea put forward by newly inaugurated New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in his January 1, 2026, inaugural address, specifically his call to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”¹
Mamdani frames collectivism as a moral and economic upgrade, centered on solidarity, shared prosperity, and government led solutions to affordability pressures. He points to policies like rent freezes, free buses, universal childcare, and city run grocery stores as ways the state can deliver abundance and bring communities together.
What this framing misses is that human flourishing isn’t delivered through centralized provision. It emerges from responsibility, agency, and the ability to discern reality clearly and act in one’s own best interest and that of the community.
Reality and Responsibility
In the past, political progress was limited by a lack of access to information and basic skills like literacy and numeracy. Many people couldn’t interpret their political or economic reality clearly, which constrained their agency and expectations of what politics could accomplish. There was never a golden age of informed citizens.
Today we face a different failure. People are flooded with information, much of it low quality ideological noise that obscures the relationship between actions and outcomes.
The result is persistent confusion and category errors in public discourse. People carry more information than ever, yet often lack a clear understanding of their own standing in society or how political decisions connect to consequences in their own lives.
In that fog, collectivist and socialist narratives gain traction, not because they work, but because they restore a familiar pattern: shifting responsibility from individuals to a centralized authority.
Failure and Corruption
Nowhere is the gap between intentions and outcomes more stark than in policy results.
In the United States, roughly 771,000 people experienced homelessness in 2024, a record high³, despite federal, state, and local governments spending over $350 billion on homelessness and housing assistance over the past decade, largely through centralized, bureaucratic programs that prioritize spending volume over outcomes.
California alone accounted for roughly 187,000, despite decades of expansive housing programs and more than $24 billion in state homelessness spending over the last five years⁴, amid growing public controversy over mismanagement, audits, and fraud investigations tied to homelessness funding and nonprofit contractors.
Canada shows the same pattern. Nearly 60,000 people were homeless on a single night in 2024, even as federal programs expanded⁵. Between 2011 and 2023, 1,678 deaths were attributed to cold exposure⁶.
Canada’s socialist style childcare expansion, built around heavy subsidies and price controls, has produced chronic shortages, with many regions falling below 20% coverage, driven by staffing shortages and capped fees that discourage new supply⁷.
Rent freezes follow the same trajectory. In San Francisco, expanded rent control reduced the rental housing supply by 15%, worsening affordability for new renters⁸.
State-run grocery systems tested abroad have always produced thin selection, chronic shortages, and persistent fiscal losses, even under heavy subsidy⁹.
These abysmal outcomes aren’t accidental. When responsibility shifts from individuals and local communities to collectivist bureaucracies, the corrective pressure of reality is lost. Larger budgets for socialism optimize only for failure and corruption.
Freedom and Prosperity
The classical liberal tradition holds that human potential expands when individual freedoms are protected and people are free to confront their economic reality without distortion.
When individuals are free to act, cooperate, innovate, and adapt, spontaneous order emerges. That process has consistently produced more resilience and prosperity than top down planning since the emergence of market based economies.
Mamdani’s collectivism, by contrast, asks people to trade away their agency for a utopian promise of security. Relief from personal accountability is always seductive, especially in a media environment saturated with conflicting narratives.
However, history shows that this bargain weakens incentives, slows progress, and delivers vastly inferior outcomes for the broader population, while enriching the political elite. The “warmth” promised by collectivism may sound compassionate, but in practice it accelerates graft and entrenches corrupt power structures.
Rugged individualism, tempered by voluntary cooperation and basic safety nets, and grounded in a clear recognition of the dysfunction inherent in centralized systems, remains our only defensible foundation for durable prosperity and human flourishing.
Sources
- Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayoral inaugural address, January 1, 2026
- World Bank and OECD, historical GDP per capita and global living standards data
- U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2024 Point in Time Homeless Count
- California Legislative Analyst’s Office and State Auditor reports on homelessness and housing spending since 2019
- Government of Canada, 2024 National Point in Time Homelessness Count
- Government of Canada Health Infobase, cold related mortality surveillance, 2011 to 2023
- Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and provincial Auditor General reports on licensed childcare availability
- Diamond, McQuade, and Qian, The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality, Stanford University
- World Bank, FAO, and academic analyses of state controlled food distribution systems in Venezuela and Cuba