The Guardian (“‘I’m over the moon’: New York’s small business owners rejoice as Mamdani cuts red tape“):
Red Scare? The democratic socialist mayor of New York City spent this week talking about red tape.
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.
“New York’s small business owners have said it over and over: endless paperwork and the uncertainty of dealing with City government has made getting their stores up and running too difficult,” Mamdani wrote on X, announcing a package of 50 policy changes aimed at easing the financial burden of fines, fees and regulations on mom-and-pop shops across the five boroughs.
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.
Ending burdensome regulations would seem the opposite of socialism: getting government out of the way, rather than exerting greater control of the economy. It was a big part of Reagan Republicanism (although, in fairness, Jimmy Carter did quite a bit of it, too). For that matter, Matt Yglesias was pushing for this kind of thing in his Juicebox Mafia days and it’s perfectly in line with the “Abundance” agenda being pushed by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
I was led to believe he was a hardcore communist bastard who would emulate Pol Pot. Perhaps this is just a distraction from the coming reign of terror, prison camps, and genocide? The smirking bastard.
