I have spent years telling my own side of the aisle that its socialist wing is an electoral anchor and a policy disaster. I have said it about the billionaire rhetoric, about the housing record here in Massachusetts, about a style of politics that prefers moral theater to material results. So understand that what follows is not a conversion story. It is the same argument, at higher stakes.
The stakes are higher because the socialists have stopped losing. They run the largest city in America. They have a wealth tax headed for the ballot in the largest state. And the thing they are now moving against is not a tax rate or a zoning code. It is the concept of private property itself, which happens to be the load-bearing wall of the entire American structure.
They publish their intentions. I quote them below.
What the founders were actually running from
Let’s start with why the country exists.
The colonists’ grievances were, at bottom, property grievances. The Crown taxed them without their consent. Customs officers used writs of assistance to ransack homes and warehouses on general suspicion. Soldiers were quartered in private houses. The complaint was not abstract. It was that a government could reach into your life and take what was yours, whenever it wanted, with no recourse.
That is why the intellectual scaffolding of the Revolution was John Locke’s Second Treatise, which grounded legitimate government in the protection of life, liberty, and property. Government exists to secure what you have earned. A government that takes arbitrarily has forfeited its legitimacy.
James Madison made it explicit in his 1792 essay “Property”: “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort... This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.” The Constitution operationalized this. The Fifth Amendment forbids taking property without due process and just compensation. Federalist No. 10 is Madison worrying, at length, about majorities voting themselves other people’s assets, which he called “an improper or wicked project.”
The founders had watched a government treat ownership as conditional, revocable, and subordinate to the state’s needs. They built a country specifically so that could never happen here. Socialism is the doctrine that ownership is conditional, revocable, and subordinate to the state’s needs. These two projects are not in tension. They are opposites.
Property rights are a middle-class technology
Socialists frame property rights as a shield for the rich. They have it exactly backwards. The rich hire lawyers. Property rights are what protect everyone else.
The entire American middle class runs on collateral. Mortgages exist because a lender believes your title is secure and enforceable. Your small business loan exists because your equipment and receivables can be pledged. Roughly 40 percent of rental units in this country are owned by individual investors, not corporations, and those buildings were financed against expected income. Credit, the machine that turns present work into future wealth, runs entirely on the assumption that ownership means something and the rules will not be rewritten mid-loan.
This is why socialist economies don’t simply fail to produce billionaires, they fail to produce middle classes. When ownership becomes contingent on the state’s ongoing approval, capital flees, and the people with the most capital flee fastest. Everyone else stays and absorbs the damage. That is the record of every country that has run the experiment, and the reason immigrants from those countries are so often the loudest alarm-ringers here.
The program, in their own words
I want to be precise, because “the socialists are coming for your property” is usually the opening line of something unhinged. So I will stick to enacted policy and published plans.
New York. Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, is mayor of the largest city in America, and in June his appointees on the Rent Guidelines Board froze rents on roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments, with a pledge to repeat it every year of his term. The 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act had already capped owners’ ability to recover costs; expenses have since grown far faster than permitted rents. A freeze on top of that is a policy of managed insolvency for a class of property owners.
The administration’s own housing plan, released in May, lays out a program it calls Fix the City: roof-to-cellar inspections of targeted portfolios, legal action under the 7A program to strip owners of day-to-day control of their buildings, referrals to district attorneys for criminal charges, and, where the city sees fit, pressure on lenders to begin foreclosure. The stated goal, on page 17, is that these buildings end up “transferred out of these bad actors’ hands and conveyed to responsible preservation purchasers” backed by tenants and the administration. The same plan endorses a bill, COPA, that would give qualified affordable-housing buyers an exclusive first window on buildings coming to market and a right to match any offer after that window closes. Squeeze the asset until it fails, then acquire it. In the twentieth century this was called nationalization and it required soldiers. The innovation of American socialism is doing it through a rent board and a housing agency, 7 to 1, on a Thursday. The plan supplies its own rebuttal to the objection that this only touches slumlords. Pages 34 and 35 concede that rising operating costs, alongside what the plan calls speculation, have pushed large, mostly rent-stabilized portfolios toward financial and physical distress, and respond with a second acquisition track: city capital and tax abatements to move those portfolios to new owners, including community land trusts and tenant co-ops. Read the two sections together. The city freezes the revenue, records the resulting distress in its own plan, and funds the transfer. The “bad actor” label describes a condition the policy itself produces. That is also what separates New York from the rent regulation in Berlin or Stockholm, which a critic will raise: those cities regulate price and stop there, while New York regulates price and then pays to transfer what the regulation breaks.
California. A ballot initiative headed for November would impose a 5 percent tax on billionaires’ net worth, including unrealized gains, meaning paper wealth that has never been sold, priced, or converted to cash. Set aside the revenue math. The principle is the thing. For the entire history of American taxation, the state has taken a share of what you actually receive. This taxes what you merely possess. Once possession itself is taxable, ownership has become a lease from the government, and the only remaining question is where the threshold sits. Thresholds move. Every income tax in American history started as a tax on a tiny sliver of the rich, and the middle class now holds tens of trillions in home equity and retirement accounts that a fiscally desperate state can see perfectly well. The Supreme Court had a chance to close this door in Moore v. United States and declined to, which leaves it open for exactly this kind of measure.
The precedent machine. If you want to see how these doors widen, look at Kelo v. New London, where the Court held that transferring homes from one private owner to a private developer counted as “public use.” The homeowners lost, the neighborhood was bulldozed, and the promised development was never built. Kelo was not a socialist decision. It was worse than that: it was proof that a permissive theory of state power over property will be ratified by respectable institutions, which is exactly the ratification today’s socialists are counting on.
Why the slope is real and not a fallacy
“Slippery slope” gets dismissed as a fallacy. It is only a fallacy when there is no mechanism connecting one step to the next. Here the mechanism is explicit, and unlike most slopes, this one comes with a stated destination. The socialist left does not believe billionaires should exist, and it does not believe the private market should lead on housing. Mamdani, asked on Meet the Press in June 2025 whether billionaires have a right to exist, answered: “I don’t think that we should have billionaires.” His own housing plan lists public-sector-led housing investment as one of its three core values, on page 8. The national platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which he is a member, names wealth taxation as the tool for moving money from billionaires to workers. The freeze and the wealth tax are waypoints toward that destination, and they are on schedule.
The method has three parts. First, ownership is a bundle of rights: to use, to exclude, to earn income, to sell, to pass on. No single policy abolishes ownership. Each removes one stick. Freeze the income stream, tax the unsold value, direct the eventual sale. At some point the owner holds title to something that no longer functions as property, and no single step was the one that did it.
Second, fiscal appetite grows, and a revenue mechanism, once validated, never stays parked at its original threshold.
Third, expectations compound. Change the rules once and it is an aberration. Change them twice and capital reprices everything. The best empirical work on rent control, from Stanford’s Rebecca Diamond and coauthors, found San Francisco’s expansion shrank rental supply by 15 percent and raised citywide rents, because owners rationally exited a business whose rules had turned against them. Socialist policy aimed at landlords landed on renters. It always does, because capital adjusts and people cannot. The socialists then cite the wreckage as proof the market failed, and prescribe more of the same. That feedback loop is not a bug in the program. It is the program.
The liberal answer
My own party needs to relearn a distinction. A liberal taxes what the market produces. A socialist revokes the market’s right to produce it. I know that line is unfashionable to insist on, partly because the people blurring it are the most energetic organizers in the room, and partly because the problems they organize around are real. Rents are too high. Wealth concentration is corrosive.
But watch which fix is the plan and which is the fallback. In Massachusetts this year, the coalition pushing rent control led with one of the strictest caps in the country: inflation or 5 percent, whichever is lower, no reset when a tenant leaves, with January 31 rents as the baseline. The moderate version, a local option with a 10 percent ceiling and vacancy decontrol, the one Wu had floated and Healey has said she supports, was offered only in June, as a bargaining chip to make the ballot question go away. The Supreme Judicial Court threw the question out three weeks later over a religious-exemption clause. At no point was anyone in that negotiation talking about how to build more. The liberal answers exist and they are not timid. Strip the zoning veto points that block supply and let people build. Tax realized income and inheritance at whatever rate voters will stand for. Close stepped-up basis, which is the actual loophole that lets unrealized gains die untaxed, and which the wealth-tax crowd rarely mentions because it is boring. None of this requires changing what it means to own something.
The socialists reject those answers, and you should ask why. The honest reason is that their goal is not cheaper rent. It is a different relationship between the citizen and the state, one where what you hold, you hold at the government’s pleasure. The founders had lived under exactly that relationship. They crossed an ocean and fought a war to end it, and they wrote its prohibition into the founding documents, because they understood that every other liberty is downstream of secure ownership.
That wall is load-bearing. The people drilling into it know that. It is why they are drilling there.