Social Issues

Avoiding Two Real and Present Dangers 

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One of my favorite longtime friends is a New York City denizen. She loves the Big Apple and is a staunch proponent of its many virtues. She and her husband (also a good friend from long ago) spent a week in and around Delray Beach last week.

We had several great and fun conversations, but we did not dive into a conversation about their recently elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani. She once told me how much she admired him, and that she voted for him knowing he was both a Socialist and an anti-Zionist Muslim. We have too many miles of good memories between us, so I thought discretion in this case would be to keep my mouth shut.

That’s not true. The truth is that I was dying to bring up the topic in a teasing way, but K cautioned me not to do it. I didn’t want to argue because I’ve never won an argument with K. Even scarier: I was afraid I’d discover that she, too, is a Mamdani fan!

So, rather than risk those very real and present dangers, I stayed mute and used the stored energy to write a piece on him for today.

Politics

Will NYC Survive Mamdani’s Housing Plan

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And Make Housing “More Affordable?”

I mentioned in the Jan. 7 issue that I’ve been wondering how much of what Zohran Mamdani said he’d do as mayor during his campaign was real and how much was just vote-seeking rhetoric.

So far, it looks like the man was not bluffing.

The first hint was his choice for the new Fire Commissioner, Lillian Bonsignore, the second woman and first openly gay woman to be appointed to that post. Critics point out that she is also the first person with no experience as a firefighter to lead the 11,000-person agency. (She does, however, have 31 years of experience in the Emergency Medical Services field, and has strong recommendations from some who worked with her during the three years she served as EMS chief.)

I think she deserves a pass on the issue of “Does she have the skills and knowledge to do her job?”

I can’t say the same thing about Cea Weaver, however.

Weaver is the woman Mamdani appointed to be “tenant director,” where she will oversee, among other things, establishing regulations that affect property ownership, tenant rights, rent-control rules, and so on.

On a 2021 podcast recently unearthed by Washington Free Beacon’s Jon Levine, Weaver says her goal is to make New York City housing “worth less” by mandating rent control regulations. While she is speaking, you can see Mamdani on the side nodding enthusiastically. Then he says, “I get most of my knowledge on housing from Cea, so if you get it from me, it’s just not coming from the source.”

She’s called for the collectivization of property (which she said will particularly affect white families). She’s called property ownership a tool of “white supremacy.” She supports the impoverishment of the white middle class, and she has called for the election of Communists.

She’s also said that it’s important for “white people to feel defeated.”

Putting aside the question of whether making white people feel defeated is something she should be doing, her plan for making NYC housing more affordable is not just wrong, it’s stupidly wrong. Because its two main strategies – rent control and public housing – have done nothing but make housing more costly every single time they have been used. Not only in NYC, but everywhere in the world.

In reviewing coverage of this on one news outlet, I found the following three reader comments that I wanted to share with you:

* “These policies will make NYC a landscape of food deserts. Then Bernie Sanders can start bread lines because bread lines are the best sign that there is bread. This approach will also help the homeless who will move into the open-air drug marts that will inevitably pop up.”

* “If they force housing to be worth less, wouldn’t they then receive less in property taxes? How would they replace those tax dollars? By raising the price of other government services?”

* “This is so surreal. We’re literally watching a bunch of financially privileged Woke postgraduates explore Socialist ideas as if it’s a project for their postgraduate thesis, but who are now in charge of the largest and most diverse city in America.”

Cea Weaver in 2019

About Cea Weaver

Cea Weaver (born Celia Weaver) serves as the director of the New York City Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. She previously coordinated the statewide organization Housing Justice for All and was a central figure in the campaign that led to the passage of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019. As a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, she has advocated for rent strikes and regulations that prioritize housing for community use rather than profit.

Economics

Is There Really a Difference Between Socialism & Communism?

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It’s a question that comes up almost every time one gets into a discussion about the virtues of “Socialism.” Libertarians, Free Market advocates, and others who understand economics and know the history of Communism in the 20th century (like yours truly) often take the position that there is no difference. And if one wants to push the argument (that they are the same), one could say, correctly, that Karl Marx used the terms interchangeably.

But in looking at the history of this debate since Marx, one has to concede that three useful (two lucid, one somewhat fuzzy) distinctions have emerged:

1. In terms of property rights, Socialism advocates for the collective ownership of major industries, but individuals can own personal property. Communism advocates for complete communal ownership. No private property at all.

2. In terms of wealth distribution, Socialism advocates for the redistribution of wealth by government ownership and/or management of all industries involved in “the means of production” and government control over all social, legal, and bureaucratic activates that affect “quality of living,” including housing, transportation, education, and health care.

3. In terms of achieving political change, Communism explicitly supports the establishment of a central government through violent revolution, whereas Socialism (or rather Socialists) often advocates change through political and legal means and social activism, which can include violent protest.

Just the Facts 

The Idea of Communism
Communism is an economic and political concept that was more-or-less invented by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who made the case that the world would be a better place for everyone if class structures, and particularly economic structures, were eliminated.

The Reality of Communism
In the 20th century, it became a system of state power following revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba, and several African states. In every case, Communist governments centralized economic, legal, political, military, and policing institutions. They then proceeded to eliminate personal liberties, including the freedom of speech and other forms of individual expression (e.g., art, music, and theater).

What About Those Nordic States?

It is often claimed that the Nordic countries are Socialist. But as their own leaders have repeatedly explained, they operate largely Free Market economies, with strong protections for private property and privately owned industries. In Denmark and Sweden, for example, the vast majority of businesses – including banks, manufacturers, retailers, and exporters – are privately owned, not state run. Government ownership is limited and far smaller than in classical Socialist systems.

Sweden’s corporate tax is 20.6%, and Denmark’s is 22%. That’s right in the middle of the US corporate tax rate, which is 21%.

Capital gains and inheritance taxes in Denmark are moderate – lower in most cases than they are in the US. And Sweden abolished its wealth tax (in 2007) and inheritance tax (in 2005).

Meanwhile, these countries provide good social services – in some (but just some) cases, providing more coverage than the US provides. And they have done that without racking up trillions of dollars of debt!

How do they do that?

This is another thing that would make people who claim Nordic countries are Socialist gag if they knew it. The tax systems in Sweden and Denmark work not because they are super-progressive (i.e., super-high taxes for rich people), but because their tax systems are broadly based. Their welfare programs are funded through flat or mildly progressive income taxes and high consumption taxes (VAT around 25%).

Translation: Middle- and working-class citizens – not just the rich – pay a substantial share of the overall taxes, unlike highly progressive tax models often associated with Socialism.

Worth Considering

Why I Do What I Do 

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From MH re my Jan. 2 “Predictions” issue: “I’m enjoying your newsletter. I’m glad you took 14 hours to plan your 2026. I started a journal this year with my goals, tasks, and inspirations, and it’s really helpful.”

 

From RT: “I wanted to share something meaningful with you. I recently translated your English Wikipedia page into Bangla so that people in my country can better understand who you are and learn from your work. Your ideas on business, long-term thinking, and sustainable growth resonate deeply with me. While our contexts may differ, I see a strong alignment in how we both value clarity, realism, and impact over hype. Translating your work felt like a small way of giving back and making thoughtful ideas more accessible to Bangla-speaking readers.”

Worth Considering

What Does Literary Fiction Have to Do with Figure Skating?

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I just read The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith, this month’s selection for the Mules (my book club). Smith is impressively adept at constructing sentences and in selecting le mot juste. In those regards, he merits A+. But good fiction is more than wordsmithing. It’s about creating stories that not only arrest our attention, capture our imagination, and somehow expand our minds and hearts, but do so in a way that is beautiful.

So how do I rate this book?

Aristotle wrote the foundational treatise on literary criticism with the Poetics, where he defines the essential elements that make a piece of literature work. Though his focus was on drama (tragedy, in particular), I’ve always found it very useful in helping me understand what I like and don’t like about the plays, movies, and other visual media I consume, as well as the books I read.

It is less than perfect, however, in helping me explain how much or how little I like them – which means that I’ve had to come up with my own way to evaluate the recommendations I make on this blog.

I came up with a system that I had great hope for at first – a rating based on the work’s “horizontality” and “verticality.”

Horizontality was about how well it created its fictional world (a time, a place, and a culture).

Verticality was about how well it portrayed – through plot, characterization, and dialog – a deep sense of what a human being is and is capable of being.

These analytical tools have not only been helpful to me in writing my recommendations, they have been helpful during book discussions at our Mules meetings, giving us terms we can use to better communicate our ideas and feelings.

Which gets me back to where I started…

How do I rate The Last Painting of Sara de Vos?

After finishing the book, I had two seemingly incompatible feelings about it.

On the one hand, I was much impressed by the author’s skill as a wordsmith. On the other hand, I felt that the story itself, while good, was not great. And that the way it was told – including the action, the plot, the characterization, and the theme – was handsome, but not beautiful.

So as a reader who very much appreciates the poetic aspects of literary fiction (the diction, the syntax, the metrics, etc.), I would have rated the book very highly. But in terms of my experience of the novel as a whole – the overall aesthetics – I would have rated it good, but not great.

The problem stuck in my craw, and I went to bed without a solution. But today, I had an idea – a very simple rating system that has been used successfully for decades. I’m talking about the way they rate ice skating performances at the Olympics. Competitors get two grades: one for technicality and another for beauty.

So now I’m thinking that it might be helpful to introduce this idea to the Mules: that in addition to the other frames of reference we can use to critique the literary fiction we read, we can provide two additional numeric ratings, one for technical and another for aesthetic virtuosity.

I’m thinking this could work.

Let me know what you think.

Social Issues

Is Mainstream Media Terminally Ill?

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Or Has It Already Become the Walking Dead? 

Mainstream media has been in a downward slide that began soon after Trump’s first term in office (2016), and the numbers have been getting worse with every passing year.

* Industry tracking shows US traditional pay TV subscriptions roughly halved over the last 11 years.

* Pew’s analysis shows cable news saw “meaningful declines” in key periods since 2016, with the steepest drops happening in CNN and MSNBC.

* Trade coverage ratings showed the same thing, with especially deep declines for MSNBC and CNN in key demographics in 2025.

* The Wall Street Journal reported CNN’s prime-time audience dropped 74% since its 2020 high, alongside layoffs and a digital pivot – useful to argue that whatever the Trump-era “attention boom” was, it did not translate into durable linear-TV strength.

* And the S&P Global Market Intelligence says only about half of US homes are expected to have pay TV by end of 2025. That’s down almost 90% since 2010.

The same thing has been going on with mainstream newspapers. A US Congressional Research Service report notes print advertising revenue for newspapers fell 92% from 2000 to 2023 (to about $6B in 2023), and total inflation-adjusted industry revenues fell about 80% from the 2000 peak. While that’s longer-run, it’s a strong backdrop for “demise” framing.

Meanwhile…

There has been an equally astounding rate of growth among the alternative media – bloggers, podcasters, and digital journalists and analysts, to whom the American public has turned for their daily consumption of political, social, economic, and even financial news and analysis.

* YouTube – while not exclusive to podcasts – reports over one billion monthly viewers for podcast content, underscoring how alternative audio/video journalism is reaching massive audiences beyond traditional platforms.

* Megyn Kelly’s independent media venture, The Megyn Kelly Show on YouTube, drew 116.8 million views in July 2023, surpassing major broadcasters like NBC and CBS during the same period. Her channel now has over 4 million subscribers and ranks among the top podcasts in the US.

* Piers Morgan Uncensored, launched outside traditional TV in 2022 and fully on YouTube in 2024, has reached 4 million YouTube subscribers with over 1 billion views since inception, showing how digital talk/news formats scale massively online.

* Substack reached 5 million paid subscriptions as of March 2025, up from about 3 million the year before. Today, Substack supports over 50,000 paid creators, with top earners collectively generating over $40 million annually.

What Happened?

It seems to me that there are four reasons for this.

First, Trump’s election in 2016 divided the country into two roughly equal-sized political groups: those that loved Trump (MAGA) and those that hated him (people with Trump Derangement Syndrome). Fox News was the only news channel that supported some of Trump’s policies (though not all of them), but the rest of mainstream TV took opposition to everything he said or did.

That created hundreds – even thousands – of opportunities for anyone with ambition and a social media account to develop an online presence by being forcefully with Trump or against him.

Second, as some of these social media producers developed large, even massive, followings, money started inserting itself into the equation, which made the idea of making good money from the basement or in a bar feel like a realistic way to grow wealth.

Third, social media algorithms developed the ability to shape the political and social opinions of millions of people, which prompted social media developers to make the technology of the algorithms increasingly more profitable. And that led to the development of digital tribal groups whose inclinations and prejudices were being amplified every day through the manipulation of these algorithms.

And fourth, with the availability of hard-core news and views on every political, social, and cultural topic ubiquitous, mainstream media began to feel – for most Americans on either side of the aisle – stale, dubious, and inauthentic.

That takes us where we are today, with practically 90% of the news and views being consumed by Americans being provided by independent journalists.

And some of them are changing the world.

Take Nick Shirley, the 23-year-old vlogger who, on December 26, posted a 42-minute video in which he approaches day care centers in Minneapolis and attempts to get information about what they do, only to discover that the centers are devoid of caretakers and children. In his initial report, he identifies over a million dollars in day care fraud. Within seven days, with the help of dozens of other citizen reporters who rushed in after him, the total estimated fraud was believed to be between $9 billion and $19 billion.

And then last week, citizen journalists traveled to LA, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York, only to discover that the Minneapolis day care scheme was well entrenched in all these cities, as well as other kinds of fraud related to elder care and various government boondoggles.

This turns out to be the biggest scam on US taxpayers in US history. And it was uncovered by the courageous work of a single, independent, digital journalist. The mainstream media knew about it for years, but decided it was not a story they wanted to tell.

I can’t see mainstream media coming back from this, do you? The heart may still be beating feebly, but the brain has long been dead.

Economics

Just the Facts: About Renewable Energy

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In case you think renewable energy is doomed to suffer the same fate as mainstream media, consider this:

* Renewable energy generated more electricity than coal in the first half of 2025 – a historic first.

* Even if no country can quite take America’s place, China will at least flood the global market with cheap green technologies, helping to stave off the worst of the climate crisis.

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