Pied-à-tricked

Hey, now! Just a moment! You were supposed to shove those other kulaks up against the wall. Not me!

*Bang.*

Or a more closely harnessed, and popularly relevant, parallel:

Say! This goofy demagogue with a beschissen combover, toothbrush stache, persistent I.B.S. caused by undercooked wiener schnitzel, and uncomprehending hatred of das Judentum commands much support. What say we give him some symbolic sinecure, maybe Reich Chancellor, and bolster our coalition with his loyal voters?

*Hissing Zyklon B.*

Or a more contemporaneous example:

Eat the rich? Well, I’m trying to cut out trans fat, so adipose tissue won’t help my slimming. But shaking down snooty nobiliares who don’t even live here to pay for more uptown bus routes? Seems reasonable. What’s a million or two to a skrillionaire anyway?

*NYC Department of Finance bill hits mailbox.*

Is there anything more cosmically just than a voter, after innocently mentating causes-and-effects of a proposed public policy, pulling the lever in full belief that a plebiscite’s ill effects will dog someone else? A deserving target more privileged, materially well-endowed, handsomer, and a far greater success? Only to have the punitive impact ricochet back, like an impish child shoving down a teeter-totter seat that slings violently back into his chin?

The good people of Gotham are finding themselves in the oracular ken of taxation’s all-seeing eye. After electing an out-and-out socialist as mayor, New Yorkers might have assumed they’d get discount bell peppers, capped rent, and free public transit in exchange for a few mogul muggings. Oh, and they’d finally be gifted the cure to the tragedy of the commons: the dumpster. At long last! No more banana peels, half-eaten naan wraps, bagel scraps, Anthora cups, and gnawed t-bones crowding the streets! Just dog urine and hypodermic needles like a real American city.

The ironic knock-on effect is known by many tropes. The law of unintended consequences; hoisted-by-one’s-own-petard; the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party effect. Hubristic planning itself also goes by many well-known shorthands: Murphy’s law; man proposes, God disposes; many a slip “twixt the cup and the lip”.

Big Apple balloters had high hopes that a socialist burgomaster would have shaken down the other, more moneyed neighbor. But now they’re getting levied, good and hard, thanks to Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax.

What’s a pied-à-terre, besides a fancy French word only used by snuffly possessors of Master’s of Sociology degrees? The city’s greenshades define it as a “luxury” property that isn’t a primary residence. So supplementary condos for globetrotting nepo kids who holiday in Manhattan during December, but spend the rest of the year in Dubai, Shanghai, or any other fast-track, internationalized metros that serve as landing pads for rootless rollers.

That was the pinch-pitch, anyway. But leftists can’t contain their grubbiness for others’ wealth. Give a socialist a dime, he’ll Luger your temporal lobe for a dollar.

Soon, reports of erroneous tax tabs hitting mailboxes were legion. One Hamptoness wailed to The Free Press that “she’s expected to pay the very tax she’s been championing for others.” Quelle horreur! Reaping what one sows!

“I don’t even own a pied-à-terre,” the tall poppy wilted, as if residency status was the intended quarry, and not idle bank hoards. Then came the familiar gripes about municipal government technology: “We tried over 20 times to get into their broken portal to upload proof of residency,” to no avail. A Byzantine, glitch-prone website strung together by 20-something disciples of a sticky-fingered pol? Tell me something I haven’t heard.

A former New York Times journalist drew attention to his 81-year-old mother mistakenly hit with the hand-it-over notice. The kindly, innocent madre is also not a seasonal squatter; she’s been a full-time New Yorker for 30 years, which sounds more exhausting than a Pyongan labor camp.

Hitting a bunch of Ethels and great-aunt Ruths with sudden, five-figure charges is the kind of thing fraudsters are routinely jailed over. But not municipal tax authorities. Guilty consciences don’t sleep, and neither does the wakeful City that, in anticipating a windfall, published a spreadsheet of price-high properties subject to the new expropriation.

To sum up the predictable path of any socialist scheme: take voters for a ride, out the well-pocketed, stoke resentment, institute a wanton shakedown, force the marks to prove their innocence, which they ultimately can’t.

Poor, poor New Yorkers, forced to live with their choices. But even in the depths of summer, the “warmth of collectivism” is halted with an unexpected flash-freeze. Socialism is bested by its arch enemy: liberalism’s technocratic inertia.