The era of socialism in New York City has begun as Mayor Zohran Mamdani was ceremoniously sworn in by the socialist Democrat Senator of Vermont, Bernie Sanders. In his inauguration speech on New Year's Day, the new mayor said: "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism…. I was elected as a democratic socialist, and I will govern as a democratic socialist."

Mamdani, aside from seeking to freeze rent on the city's nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments as part of his socialist agenda, has also vowed to implement city-owned grocery stores. The idea of having government-owned housing and businesses, in lieu of private ownership, is not only anti-American but also anti-Catholic.

The English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), to whom the American Founding Fathers primarily reverted to establish their democratic nation-state, expounded on the ideal structure for government, sustaining three fundamental institutional categories: "religious toleration and freedom of religion, the rule of law within a constitutional government with limited functions, and robust private property rights" [emphasis added].

The freedom to private property became reciprocal, i.e., the liberty we possess cannot be protected without private property. In other words, as the Austrian-British economist and philosopher Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992) said in his New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas:

There can be no freedom of press if the instruments of printing are under government control, no freedom of assembly if the needed rooms are so controlled, no freedom of movement if the means of transport are a government monopoly.

And Locke said,

[E]very man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. [emphasis added]