Newly-inaugurated NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani began his reign by praising collectivism and attacking private property.
By Fr. Mario Alexis Portella
Crisis Magazine
January 7, 2026
The era of socialism in New York City has begun as Mayor Zohran Mamdani was ceremoniously sworn in by the socialist Democrat Senator of Vermont, Bernie Sanders. In his inauguration speech on New Year's Day, the new mayor said: "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.... I was elected as a democratic socialist, and I will govern as a democratic socialist."
Mamdani, aside from seeking to freeze rent on the city's nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments as part of his socialist agenda, has also vowed to implement city-owned grocery stores. The idea of having government-owned housing and businesses, in lieu of private ownership, is not only anti-American but also anti-Catholic.
The English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), to whom the American Founding Fathers primarily reverted to establish their democratic nation-state, expounded on the ideal structure for government, sustaining three fundamental institutional categories: "religious toleration and freedom of religion, the rule of law within a constitutional government with limited functions, and robust private property rights" [emphasis added].
The freedom to private property became reciprocal, i.e., the liberty we possess cannot be protected without private property. In other words, as the Austrian-British economist and philosopher Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992) said in his New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas:
There can be no freedom of press if the instruments of printing are under government control, no freedom of assembly if the needed rooms are so controlled, no freedom of movement if the means of transport are a government monopoly.
And Locke said,
[E]very man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. [emphasis added]
This is a reason why the Framers of the U.S. Constitution worked tirelessly to balance an efficient governmental structure that would safeguard individual liberties. The Fifth Amendment, which states: "No person...shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation," reflects this balance, drawing from the Magna Carta (1215), which placed limits on the sovereign to seize property.
The same notion was paralleled by Pope Leo XIII in his famous encyclical on the Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor, Rerum Novarum (1891). Addressing the exploitations of the worker during the Industrial Revolution, Leo XIII also condemned the socialist and communist economic policies, even though neither had yet been materialized within a body politic as it eventually did with the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922.
"Now, when man thus turns the activity of his mind and the strength of his body toward procuring the fruits of nature," the pope stated,
by such act he makes his own that portion of nature's field which he cultivates-that portion on which he leaves, as it were, the impress of his personality; and it cannot but be just that he should possess that portion as his very own, and have a right to hold it without any one being justified in violating that right. [emphasis added] (RN 9)
To put it in simple words, "It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages in remunerative labor, the impelling reason and motive of his work is to obtain property, and thereafter to hold it as his very own" (RN 5).
Owning private property also compels one to be responsible. Hence, while voting rights were limited to white men at the inception of the United States of America, men had to be property owners to exercise this right. Having free buses, as Mamdani wants, is as capricious as having a free university education, for example-even if one wins a scholarship or earns a grant of sorts, financially investing into a higher education teaches the individual the responsibility of accountability.
Socialism and communism are evil in themselves, for their philosophies deprive man of the divine mandate to responsibly look after God's creation:
Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." (Genesis 1:26)
The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. (Genesis 2:15)
Catholic social teaching upholds private property as one of the most vital components to promote individual security and family stability. This is why, a year after Karl Marx published his Communist Manifesto, Pope Pius IX denounced both socialist and communist doctrines in his 1849 encyclical Nostis et Nobiscum.
The pope warned:
The final goal shared by these teachings, whether of Communism or Socialism, even if approached differently, is to excite by continuous disturbances workers and others, especially those of the lower class, whom they have deceived by their lies and deluded by the promise of a happier condition. They are preparing them for plundering, stealing, and usurping first the Church's and then everyone's property. After this they will profane all law, human and divine, to destroy divine worship and to subvert the entire ordering of civil societies. (NN 18)
This is what is to be expected with Mamdani's agenda in New York-and not just there-if the right to private property is not defended against the socialist/communist doctrines that risk becoming law in the land of the free.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.