When Communist Schemes and Proletariat Dreams Collide with Economic Reality (Part 2)

By Andrew Zuelke

Chairman, Constitution Party of Wisconsin

Many economic principles are common sense, even to those who have never run their own business. Below are just a few:

1. Private businesses must make a profit; governments don’t have to.

According to the New York Post, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently announced that the city’s five city-owned grocery stores will offer a 30% discount on foods like produce, meat, and seafood. Set aside the fact that Mayor Mamdani of NYC has never run his own business. He is putting government-run grocery stores in direct competition with one huge advantage over private stores: private businesses are not funded with taxpayer money.

2. Businesses have to charge more in their stores than they paid for the products they bought from suppliers, or they will lose money.

People rail against the rising costs of food, medicine, and other staples and shake their fists at the “evil corporations” when they move out of their communities, but they never blame politicians for the policies they pass against businesses or for a lack of law enforcement.

3. Businesses, large and small, can only lose money for so long before they no longer have the means to pay their workers, buy the needed products to stock their shelves, or pay their other expenses.

Multi-million-dollar businesses like Walgreens and Walmart can lose money for a time and hold out longer than a small business can, but eventually they too will fail if they don’t close individual stores that lose money through declining demand, theft, and/or threats of violence against employees and customers. People simply won’t shop where they don’t feel safe.

4. One of the benefits of being wealthy is having mobility.

Robbgodshaw, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

For decades, Democrats campaigned on “getting the rich to pay their fair share” and “tax the rich.” Leftists rail against the tax breaks for the rich, but they, along with the Republicans, drafted the confusing, punitive progressive income tax with all its tax forms, which you and I suffer under. Why didn’t Democrats, when they had the House and Senate majority for the first two years of the first Obama administration, use their two-year majority to draft a new federal tax code that exposed and eliminated those tax breaks from the federal tax code forever? For the same reason Republicans in the majority don’t; both parties receive campaign donations from wealthy donors who benefit from those tax breaks. Neither party wants to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. What other explanation is there?

Driving Businesses Away

Yet, communists like Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Mayor Brandon Johnson, and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, through their anti-rich rhetoric, are driving the wealth-creators out of their cities. Wilson joined a rally and called for a Starbucks boycott. As a result, Starbucks will now expand in Tennessee, resulting in a possible $750 million loss in tax revenue in Washington state. Under Mamdani, businesses like Citadel, JP Morgan, and Wells Fargo are moving part or all of their operations out of the city. In Chicago, since 2022 and also after Johnson became mayor in May of 2023, Walgreens, Boeing, Caterpillar, and others have moved out of Chicago. And the Chicago Bears Board of Directors voted in June to build their new stadium in Hammond, Indiana.

Here’s the thing: Democrats can’t legally force job creators or the wealthy to stay put and keep paying their taxes in a given municipality or state. These socialist mayors and governors will have to stand by helplessly and watch while the business owners shut down their factories, lay off all their employees, sell off their land and homes, and take their possessions and their taxable money with them.

Pressing Forward Anyway

Paul Reynolds from Dublin, Ireland, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Now, I did not write this article to defend the wealthy. One thing I’ve learned listening to the rantings of socialists – and communists – is that when they want something (free college, free health care, free housing, free this, free that…) and they believe that something is a “right,” they will press forward no matter what obstacles stand in their way, like losing too much tax base (or common sense, or economics, etcetera). They will never say to each other, “Comrades, we really wanted to fund this or give out that, but now that too many wealthy have left, we no longer have enough tax revenue left. So, we’ll have to give up on free college, free housing, “undocumented migrant” housing and other plans or put them on hold indefinitely.”

Here is my concern. Socialists/communists like the Democratic Socialists of America and much of the Democrat Party in various municipalities and states will press forward with their communist schemes and proletariat dreams anyway, raising the property and other taxes of those middle-and low-income folks who remain…whether they can shoulder the burden or not.

Listen to this blog post as an audio file below.