Mike the Mad Biologist

One of the truly bizarre things about the coverage of NYC’s mayoral race (which led to the election of Zohran Mamdani) is that the coverage was along the lines of “Would a Mayor Mamdani nationalize the means of production and institute a dictatorship of the proletariat”, while the reality is he’s doing a lot of things any competent Democrat should have–and clearly could have–done. The latest tyranny from the dictatorship of the proletariat is… small business regulations (boldface mine)?

On Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani – the politician at the center of a revived rightwing panic about socialists and purported communists winning elections across America – posted a video on X of himself putting a sheet of paper with the phrase “RED TAPE” into a paper shredder. Other pieces of paper, with phrases like “cumbersome fees and fines” and “a permit you need just to serve ice-cream”, were shredded too. The video, set to Wu Tang Clan’s If Time Is Money, shows Mamdani joining a handful of city officials and small business owners throwing the resulting paper shreds into the air like confetti…

At a press conference in the Bronx, Mamdani listed some of the onerous policies getting the axe. Bodega owners will no longer need a separate license to sell the same products outside the store – like fruit and flowers – as inside. Restaurants will no longer need a “superfluous” frozen dessert permit to sell ice-cream on top of the permit already required to sell food. Barber shops will no longer have to renew their permit every year, instead doing so every three years. Street fair vendor permit fees will be reduced, restaurant inspections will be sped up, and equipment registration fees will be eliminated for a year.

A corresponding executive order signed by Mamdani on Monday will also expand the NYC Best program, assigning each of the city’s 180,000 small businesses – which employ an estimated 1 million people – a case worker to help owners navigate the Big Apple’s sometimes byzantine bureaucracy.

Like I said:

The reforms are also at odds with the hysterical caricature of Mamdani being manufactured by Donald Trump, the Republican party, and rightwing media. The right has repeatedly depicted the mayor, and a wave of his fellow electeds from the Democratic Socialists of America, as raging anti-business radicals. Appearing on Fox News in May, Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for New York governor, alleged that if “you own… a “small business, a grocery store, a bodega, Zohran Mamdani wants to take your property.”

It’s clear from the opposition, both rightwing and moderate Democrats, that they fear, not that Mamdani will run the city into the ground, but that he will be successful.

Because this is stuff moderate Democrats could have done all along, but they chose not to do so.

And I hope D.C.’s mayor elect is taking notes.