Nothing says 'socialism' like people fleeing from it.

This is as true in New York, Illinois, and California as it was in the U.S.S.R., Venezuela, and Cuba.

But the prospect of young and dogmatic socialist Zohran Mamdani becoming mayor of New York City has taken the phenomenon to a new level.

Mamdani's lead in the polls has narrowed, but he still leads by six points. The majority of New Yorkers have split their votes between disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and peripatetic safety advocate Curtis Sliwa, divvying up more than 50% of the vote it would otherwise be if the two united.

According to the New York Post:

Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers are prepared to bolt from the Big Apple if socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani wins Tuesday’s mayoral race — potentially setting the stage for the largest population flight in US history, an alarming new poll warned early Monday.

Around 765,000 people of the 8.4 million residents who call New York City home are preparing to leave, with about 9% of New Yorkers sharing that they would “definitely” leave the city if Mamdani is elected the 111th mayor, the Daily Mail reported, citing a survey conducted by J.L. Partners.

If those residents were to leave, it would be equal to the population of Washington, DC, Las Vegas, or Seattle fleeing the city.

Thatt's quite the advertisement for the impact of socialism, which is to say, high prices, high taxes, unequal justice, lack of representation, lack of freedom, waste, fraud, ripoffs, crime, a lower standard of living, and a crummy, corrupt nomenklatura elite growing rich off the people who have to work for a living. 

Those are the 'fruits' of socialism, everywhere it is tried.

And not once have socialists in the recent era ever been called in to answer for it.

Gavin Newsom in California certainly hasn't, not seriously at least. He has gotten away with gaslighting about whole phenomenon, claiming it's not really true, though his intense efforts to woo illegal aliens to his state as well as redistrict it for Democrats alone, disenfranchising 40% of California's voters, is clearly evidence that he knows all to well that people are fleeing his expensive, one-party, increasingly freedom-less, state.

The same can be said of New York's, Illinois's, Oregon's, and Massachusetts's governors, along with any other one-party blue states. All of them are losing population, for the exact same reasons.

Looking abroad, it's the same story. Has anyone ever called Nicolas Maduro and his narco-Marxist political associates out on their setting off the biggest refugee wave on the planet? The numbers shown here surpass those of nations at war:

I think it was the late Robert Conquest who first noted that socialism is a constant state of war on the people.

People flee wars.

And what is Mamdani promising that amounts to war? Well, his government-run grocery scheme is bound to put bodega owners out of business, even if some foolishly think they'll get in on the government contract action. After the cash gets stolen or mismanaged and it eventually runs out, the shortages come next -- and there won't be any bodega owners to fill in the gap, they'd have been long gone, being the ones to go first.

Mamdani also wants free bus service for New Yorkers, financed by new taxes on 'the rich.' He plans to turn them into floating mobile homeless shelters and too bad about the people who need to get to work -- they will quit riding even if the ride is free and take safer forms of transport at higher prices.

He also wants rent control, which New York already has, vowing to target 'greedy' landlords, who are often industrious immigrants who restore houses and rent them out at razor-thin margins and a lot of sweat equity. They too will abandon this kind of housing and the place will take on that Beirut, Lebanon look dating from its bad years, or the return of Fort Apache rubble and ruin.

Mamdani would also like unequal taxation of properties, based on the color of one's skin, a bad idea that in an ideal world wouldn't clear the courts, but with New York's corrupted justice system, might just allow it. Older residents and white residents will see a target on their backs and get out.

Jewish residents, who have lived in New York for centuries, will have ample reason to flee, too, given Mamdani's grotesque associations with Islamist radicals, including one freak who was an undicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His refusal to condemn terrorism or antisemitism gets the message across. Jews will be blamed for everything that goes wrong in his socialist funhouse experiment and it certainly will.

He's also all in for defunding the police, and leftist radicals, such as pro-Hamas protest organizer Linda Sarsour, who vows to hold him to his promise, essentially declaring that he will be her little pawn. He will no doubt cave to her and her crazed demands, doing what he is told:

The flight plans of nearly a million New Yorkers are borne of experience, often with socialism itself and its siren songs of promise, but also just living long enough to see the pattern and knowing how it's going to go.

This, by the way, is just the initial number who want out. There are many New Yorkers who would like to flee and for various reasons, can't flee, or who know Mamdani's bad but believe, rightly or wrongly, that they can ride the storm. But as socialism puts its bony fingers around the neck of New York City, you can bet there will be more fleeing than just these initial numbers. And it's very unlikely that anyone will want in to counterbalance flight, even at fire-sale prices. You can ask a Venezuelan how easy it was to sell prime buildings or farmland once the socialism kicked in and it was time to get out.

Flight is a vote of no-confidence for socialism through the most dramatic means possible: By voting with one's feet. It doesn't matter that New York's Gov. Kathy Hochul and other Democrats have issued their hearty endorsements for Mamdani over their fellow Democrat, Andrew Cuomo. Voters can see that they are just caving, too.

They don't want to cave, though. They are getting out while they can, and this is starting early.

Image: Robert Couse-Baker, via PxHere (cropped) // CC BY 2.0 Deed