In his election night victory speech, New York City’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani proclaimed that more government is the answer to just about everything: “We will prove,” he said to cheers, “that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”

It was an astonishing statement — and a revealing one. In that sentence, Mamdani distilled the essence of his socialist creed: Nothing lies beyond the proper reach of government. There is no aspect of society that cannot be improved through the machinery of the state. Mamdani’s credo amounted to an inversion of President Reagan’s famous quip that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

Whether you applaud Mamdani’s words or recoil from them depends on whether you believe that progress and human flourishing depend primarily on the exercise of political power or personal initiative. Socialists like Mamdani place their faith in government: Give the state enough money and authority, they believe, and injustice can be eradicated, poverty abolished, and happiness assured to all. (These days, many MAGA Republicans do too.) But an older philosophy, tested over time, sees things differently. It holds that society works best not from the top down but from the bottom up, and that the best way for individuals, families, and communities to get things done is usually to do them without government involvement.

Behind Reagan’s jest was a deeply rooted American conviction. Thomas Paine summarized it in “Common Sense,” his influential 1776 pamphlet. “Society in every state is a blessing,” Paine wrote. “But government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil — and in its worst state, an intolerable one.” Freedom, dignity, and prosperity thrive not when government manages every aspect of life, but when it keeps its distance — performing only those essential functions individuals cannot do for themselves, such as maintaining public safety, enforcing the law, and providing basic infrastructure.

Mamdani campaigned for mayor not on reducing government’s involvement in the lives of New Yorkers, but on entangling it further. He vows to provide free childcare, create a network of city-owned supermarkets, freeze rents, eliminate bus fares, raise the minimum hourly wage to $30, build housing with public funds, and — of course —sharply raise taxes on wealthy residents and corporations.

Many of the incoming mayor’s proposals have a dismal track record. Again and again, socialist nostrums — whether marketed as “democratic” or otherwise — have not only failed to solve problems they were intended to address but also have made them worse.. Wherever socialism has been imposed, its failures have been comprehensive: more poverty, less freedom, fewer resources, stunted growth, rising authoritarianism, and heartbreaking desperation. For example, socialism destroyed Venezuela, turning the country that had the highest standard of living in Latin America into an impoverished basket case.

“It’s hard to think of another idea,” political scholar Joshua Muravchik wrote in 2019, “that has been tried and failed as many times in as many ways or at a steeper price in human suffering.” Not surprisingly, many of socialism’s fiercest critics are former true believers whose eyes were opened by seeing the harm socialism causes.

So I have little doubt that Mamdani’s anti-market schemes will prove a bust. And I imagine that more than a few New Yorkers who are now ecstatic supporters of Mamdani, eager for him to implement his agenda, will end up deeply disenchanted with the idea that “there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”

The worst effects of Mamdani-ism aren’t economic but moral. When government assumes responsibility for rectifying every inequity and soothing every hurt, it smothers the habits of self-reliance and neighborly concern that make a society humane. As government expands, citizens contract. What once was handled by families, congregations, charities, and voluntary associations is displaced by impersonal agencies staffed by strangers.

When people get used to looking to government for answers, they eventually forget how to act without it. Entitlement replaces enterprise; dependency supplants duty. The bonds of community — the mutual aid and decency that Alexis de Tocqueville regarded as America’s particular genius — begin to fray. Other people’s needs come to be viewed not as our concern, but the government’s.

A flourishing city, like a flourishing democracy, depends not on omnipotent government but on competent citizens. There’s a reason no avowed socialist has ever led New York City in its four hundred years, and the city’s residents are about to rediscover it. They will learn the inevitable lesson: When government is involved in everything, nothing works as well as it should. Mayor-elect Mamdani has made many promises, but there is only one public service he is sure to deliver: The next four years will remind New Yorkers why voting for socialists is a bad idea.