Europeans Recognize Zohran Mamdani's Policies as 'normal'

The general pitch is “raise taxes to make life more affordable for all”. That’s an idea Europeans can identify with.

The point is that most of his policies are part of the normal churn of debate in a great many countries and are not seen as extreme, even if not implemented.

eg: "Free" public transport is a thing in Queensland, Australia.

( Okay, it's actually 50 cent flat rate fares: https://translink.com.au/tickets-and-fares/50-cent-fares .. so lets call that 'nominal' )

All of those things _tend_ to be free only if you can't afford them, are a single mother/father. Average childcare in my area is 900 euros per month, which is a lot in Italy where average salary is twice than that.

Public one exists, getting in is hard.

As for him claiming to being a socialist I don't find anything wrong/strange with it. US really needs this kind of politicians too.

NYC has time and again resisted calls to dismantle the current child care program, which costs the exchequer around $3b [0]. Mamdani's plan is to take the current child care program and make it "universal" at $6b.

> we need to buy tickets to ride the bus

Again, not without a precedent as MTA has ran some routes for free for many months. Besides, MTA sees 40%+ fare evasion, but MTA needs to pay the bills somehow, and Mamdani's proposal, which may go no where, is that rises in corporate tax will fill this ~$800m hole.

> rent freezes don't work

Depends on what the sought / desired outcome from rent regulation is. In Mamdani's case, it apparently is a stop-gap to control cost of living for the working class, until enough newer housing units can be built despite NIMBYs [1].

[0] https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-nycs-publicly-...

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/11/mamdani-...

Become communist (or communist lite) and reserve land ownership to the state, lock land price to its productive capacity (as assessed by the state), mediate sales and usage taxes based on the same. Prevent resale/sublet between individuals. Allow transfer of control only from individual -> state -> individual.

Or use a regulatory approach where only the state can set the price of land, and the price is based on well-defined factory (productivity, proximity to population centers, population density, etc).

All value in an economy arises from real estate. Real estate (and the related businesses, including banking and lending) drive all economic activity in the world.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/real-estate/high-housing-co...

However it's not politically viable to advocate that as a policy solution without a stopgap policy to make progress in the interim.

But I think they are "normal" left wing policies in Europe in the sense that parties in various countries/cities/regions have campaigned on them or implemented them.

But my understanding of some US media is these are depicted as borderline communism.

Also shows you they had to search far and wide to find examples.

Free transport? Tallin, Estonia (presumably the only capital city), population: 450k

Government-run grocery stores? Turkey (barely even Europe), only accessible to the poor

Free childcare? Portugal, introduced in 2022, and hardly universal: while the program is open to all, places are limited and can be tough to access

Rent freeze? Established in Berlin in 2020, ruled unconstitutional in 2021.

In other words, garbage article and extremely clickbaity (and lying) title.

If two Europeans recognize it as normal the headline is correct.

On policing, Urban Alchemy is the company that was contracted in SF. Having worked directly with Urban Alchemy for years in LA, their staff are severly underqualified and 95% of the time will do nothing once arriving on site. The most I've ever seen them do is break up a fight. Is doing nothing better than actively harming people and making the situation worse, as the police often do? Yes. Is it improving the situation? No. Also, what is your definition of success? No first responder can prevent a crime from happening, all responders arrive after crime has occurred. Putting people into cages as the only option actually leads to worse outcomes for crime. And after decades and billions of dollars spent on the failed war on drugs, we know that is not a viable or successful approach. Part of the job these alternatives are supposed to be doing, is addressing root upstream causes of crime.

On the other hand, the alternative to policing pilot in Denver, Support Team Assistance Response (STAR), has been a wild success.

I've read it has worked very well, though not necessarily in SF in particular. Do you happen to remember where you read that?

It's hard to imagine why having mental health professionals address mental health problems would be a bad idea.

Economic historian Trevor Jackson engaged with Abundance (together with eco-radical book Overshoot) in the September issue of the American left-ish publication NYRB, if you're curious about an earnest essay [0].

Since it's behind a paywall and the Overshoot book also gets reviewed, I picked out the most substantive quotes to highlight the actual critique:

> The evidentiary core of each chapter consists of a summary of the academic work of a few experts, usually economists, with frequent and lengthy quotations, as well as the occasional interview, whose conclusions are repeated uncritically. (To take one example, they quote without scrutiny the claim of Zoom CEO Eric Yuan that he is requiring employees to work in person in order to foster trust, rather than to impose discipline or to recoup the costs of commercial real estate.) They give no sense of the unruly literatures on their subjects, the ranges of disagreement, the difficult problems and mutually exclusive solutions. They claim to set an agenda for a new liberal political order, but what they have done is read some economists and argue, again, for deregulation.

> Klein and Thompson are opposed to redistribution, which they refer to as “parceling out the present” and which they claim is “not enough,” and instead of imagining “social insurance programs,” they propose that we make “technological advances.” [...] Klein and Thompson do not seem to realize that their proposals would also entail large-scale redistribution and that the ills they seek to cure are the result of inequality rather than regulation, because they do not seem to understand how prices and property work in capitalism. Translating higher profits to shorter workweeks would require a scale of redistribution that far outstrips anything Bernie Sanders has proposed. Claiming that profits will be shared because they are based on “the collective knowledge of humanity” opens up a wider set of imperatives than they realize. Most profit, labor, and technology is in some way built on the collective knowledge of humanity, in the sense that education, work, and knowledge are shared, social, and cumulative, and all workers are the result of collective social reproduction.

> They devote no serious thought to the basic political problem that homeowners are a large and powerful constituency, especially at the local level, who are likely to oppose (or already do oppose) the reforms Klein and Thompson suggest because driving down the cost of housing will drive down the value of homes. That constituency has produced undeniably regressive politics—which is a political fact to be reckoned with. So must the fact that homeowners organize to protect their asset prices because decades of American policy have used mortgages to substitute for the welfare state and wage growth. Any plausible agenda to drive down the cost of housing is going to require things like social housing, rent controls, and some mechanism to keep Blackstone and other private equity giants from buying up all the new housing and holding it empty until prices rise. Housing abundance calls for redistribution, in other words, as well as an aggressive state willing to confront property owners ranging from homeowner coalitions to asset managers.

> Klein and Thompson likewise seem unaware that technologies are owned by people. Despite an entire chapter on the problems of scaling technologies to mass consumption, they do not pause to consider that the self-driving cars, the lab-grown meat, and the solar electricity of their imagined future will be property, whose owners will have an interest in higher profits, higher rents, and higher prices. Klein and Thompson’s agenda is predicated on avoiding distributional conflicts by increasing supply so as to lower prices, yet they do not address the problem that lower prices are good for buyers but bad for sellers, and therefore are themselves a kind of distributional conflict, though one mediated through markets instead of politics. Their faith in markets is axiomatic. In passing, they describe “modern liberal politics” as an effort to “make universal” a set of “products and services.” Not justice, equality, dignity, or freedom, but products and services. This is the vision of the future that has attracted millions of dollars to remake the Democratic Party.

> Klein and Thompson do not cite but bring to mind John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which also imagined a future of abundance and shorter workweeks. Keynes predicted future GDP almost perfectly, but he thought economic growth would be widely shared, and his future included a solution to technological unemployment as well as the end of the accumulation of wealth as a source of social importance. Klein and Thompson do not consider why this future was superseded, and now, ninety-five years later, they set out to imagine it again, believing the past is a long trajectory of technological progress temporarily held back by regulation and social protections enacted by procedural liberals. For them, the relation of the past to the future is part of a story of overcoming, not a tragedy of lost possibilities. They are right that much of the blame for our current predicaments can be traced to the forms of liberal governance since the 1970s, but they are mistaken to blame, more specifically, its predilection for environmental regulation and building codes. Rather, it is the way liberal politicians have either acquiesced to or actively encouraged the rise of an unaccountable tech and finance oligarchy that now threatens the continued existence of democracy itself and that claims a monopoly on the capacity to imagine and create the future.

[0] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/09/25/how-to-blow-up-a...

You're not as informed as you think you are, probably because you're not an NYC resident and have no actual stake in this election. We successfully passed 3 ballot proposals that reduce regulation and review time for building certain housing units. Mamdani voted for all 3 also. More deregulation is needed and expected under Mamdani - not to the tune of enriching developers, but for building actual affordable units.

Side rant: A lot of people on HN talk about building more supply. And we do - if you've lived in NYC for an appreciable amount of time, you'll know how different LIC, Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Downtown BK, and Gowanus (among others) look like after 10 years of intense development. Despite receiving tax breaks (421a), most units are not affordable. They're also incredibly cheaply built and generally unpleasant places to live, chock full of excessive amenities that drive up the rent. There's a balance here between freeing developers and allowing them to run buckwild with "affordable" 5k/mo studios. It's easy to quote Paul Krugman on HN about supply side housing and rent regulation but there's more to the story here than just "build more".

I do not think it is a good article. Quite a few posts indicate the flaws.