After Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City mayoral primary, conservatives dusted off their favorite insult: socialism is just “free stuff,” and Mamdani only won because that’s what he promised. (See here and here.) Donald Trump Jr, echoing his dad, sneered that no amount of “free stuff” will fix the city.
Yes, Mamdani’s program does have the audacity to offer New Yorkers free bus rides and free childcare. But it’s curious that the Trumps are so quick to ridicule the very idea, since Donald Trump himself received over $400 million of free stuff from his father. More broadly, as much as 50 to 60 percent of wealth in the West is simply inherited. Inheritance is the purest form of free stuff: you don’t earn it; you just get it because of who your parents are. Strangely, conservatives never seem to mind that. Free buses are socialism run amok; a trust fund is the American dream.
What’s going on when critics scoff at “free stuff”? I’m a philosopher. It’s my job to look for arguments and carefully analyze them. So let’s look to see what sense we can make of this ubiquitous conservative refrain.
Maybe it is just the old saying: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Even if a bus ride or childcare is free to the user, someone must pay for it. But nobody, least of all Mamdani, is under the illusion that these programs cost nothing. If that is all the conservatives are getting at, then they are attacking a straw man.
Senator Rand Paul takes it further. In his book The Case Against Socialism, he warns against the “siren call of free stuff” and says we should put our “faith in the individual, and in liberty.” He claims that a capitalist free market system means that wealth is “to a large degree, based on merit,” whereas socialism hands out benefits to people who haven’t earned them.
There is at least an argument here. Put in utterly explicit form:
Anti-Socialism Argument
Premise 1: Any system in which…
Auteur: Scott Sehon
