Leftists Need to Stop Getting Hung up on $3

Lotta nickel and diming in this glorious revolution

Zohran Mamdani’s plan for free New York City buses gets a surprising amount of attention; it is, after all, a plan about busses that most people will never ride in a city that many people consider to be Sodom-with-worse-trash-collection anyway. But the obvious reason why Mamdani’s plan gets debated is because it’s a proxy for lefty/socialist ideas, generally. We’re debating bus fares because a city with a bigger GDP than Switzerland might soon be run by a guy whose economic worldview seems to be to just point to stuff and say “that should be free.”

Mamdani also throws a log on the Twitter fire by saying stuff like this:¹

Responding to people who assault bus drivers over a $2.90 fare by eliminating the fare is like responding to a zombie invasion by removing your brain. Crap like this is why Republicans enjoy a huge trust advantage on crime even though they’re led by a guy who makes Slenderman look like a model of pious lawfulness.

Personally, I oppose free buses, which is a position I developed while riding LA’s functionally fee-optional² mass transit, in which a “bus” is really just a rolling methadone clinic. Still, my opposition to free buses is not that strong. I think the policy nets out in the negative — the results of Mamdani’s much-trumpeted free bus pilot were a lot more ambiguous than he claims³ — but it has some benefits.

So, why am I writing this? Because I think it’s fascinating how eliminating minor costs has become a staple of American socialism. Isn’t socialism a grand theory about burning down the old economic order so that a socialist economy might rise from the ashes? How did that morph into frequent crusades against fees that can be paid with pocket change? And don’t socialists realize that the difference between free and almost free is a very big deal?