Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) swears in Zohran Mamdani (Courtesy of NYC Mayor’s Office)

In responding to my criticism on Zohran Mamdani’s embrace of collectivism, Logan Hines mistakes my critique of ideology for a critique of every policy said to serve the public good. My argument was never that free buses, childcare subsidies, or public infrastructure are equivalent to Soviet central planning. It was that collectivism, as a foundational political ideal, rests on a fatally wrong premise: that the individual must be subordinate to the collective. That does not mean a free society must reject every public institution or every form of government action; that would be anarchy. A free society requires institutions to secure the conditions of liberty, and so the American tradition long recognized a public role in areas such as education, infrastructure, and civic development.

But acknowledging that a free society requires government action does not vindicate their modern form. Public education is a useful example. As Thomas Jefferson envisioned it, public education was meant to cultivate citizens capable of reason and independent thought, and so ready for self-government. But we have drifted far from that model toward an education system that is increasingly more centralized, bureaucratic, and insulated from competition, offering less a model of liberal institutionalism than a cautionary example of collectivist drift.

The results are telling. Despite inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending substantially increasing over the years and government spending per pupil on education being among the highest in the world, American children are falling behind in mathematics and reading. Nor is it suceeding on its own civic terms. In 2023, just 13 percent of students were deemed “proficient” in U.S. history and just 22 percent in civics. The problem with our education system is not a lack of collectivism, but a lack of competition. This is why I support a publicly funded voucher system that allows parents and students to send their children to a school of their choice, subject to state regulations. This would allow much-needed competition in our K-12 education system, rather than government-run monopolies that have failed students for decades and are not held accountable.

A recent warning about Mamdani’s collectivist-inspired policies is his call for government-owned grocery stores to address grocery affordability. It’s important to recognize that the government can offer goods for “free” or at a reduced cost, but that does not mean it’s costless. In fact, it usually means the government has restricted prices. Prices act to reveal the true costs of things and lead to an efficient allocation of resources. Mamdani’s first city-owned grocery store in East Harlem will cost $30 million to build, more than four times the cost of building a Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s the same size. The New York mayor campaigned on affordability, but his agenda works against that. Spending taxpayer dollars on free buses, universal childcare, and inefficient city-owned grocery stores only deepens a $5.4 billion budget crisis.

If Mamdani wants to make groceries more affordable, he should directly address the scarcity that drives prices up in the first place. Poor New Yorkers would be better served through direct food or cash assistance, paired with fewer zoning, permitting, tax, and regulatory barriers on private grocers. More stores, more competition, and lower operating costs would do far more for affordability than costlier grocery models funded by taxpayers.

Hines presents collectivism as a way of escaping what he calls “The Inferno of Individualism.” But individualism is not the source of the modern world’s misery; it was the impetus towards global prosperity. To call individualism an inferno is to mistake fire for pure destruction. The liberty to think, speak, assemble, trade, dissent, and build has always carried risks, but it is also what lights the path to discovery, ingenuity, and human flourishing. This progress depend on the odd one out: Galileo, the innovator, the dissenter willing to stand apart from the collective and challenge the dogma of their age. Collectivism, by contrast, asks the individual to surrender conviction for conformity, ambition for obedience, and originality for the safety of the group. The real danger is not the fire of liberty, but the desire to smother it, for to shed individualism is to shed the future.

Collectivism Still Does Not Work