Conservatives and Republicans are up in arms over the nomination and likely election of Zohran Mamdani, a self-described socialist, as mayor of New York City. The right-wingers are shocked — shocked! — that people could actually elect a died-in-the-wool socialist to serve as mayor of the nation’s largest city.

Come on! Who are they fooling? Even though they are loathe to admit it, conservatives and Republicans are every bit as socialist as Mamdani. …

In other words, in all their denunciations of Mamdani’s socialism, how many Republicans and conservatives advocate the repeal, not reduction or reform, of the entire federal income tax and a total dismantling of the welfare-state way of life that FDR foisted onto the American people in the 1930s? None! That’s because they all believe in socialism, albeit in different degrees and aspects than Mamdani. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, “We are all socialists now!” (Well, not all of us!)

Our American ancestors, who rejected income taxation, the IRS, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the entire welfare state, along with things like paper money, the Federal Reserve, the national-security state, the war on drugs, foreign wars and interventionism, and the war on immigrants, for more than 100 years had it right. They understood that a free, prosperous, and charitable society is necessarily one in which people are free to keep everything they earn and decide for themselves what to do with their own money. I’m with them.