Smirking Mamdani’s scorn for business will not help NYC prosper

“Tax the rich. Billionaire tears not included,” Sen. Liz Warren smugly captioned a photo of her sitdown with Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and Lina Khan: What a great message to send to Gotham’s business community, and to any companies that had been thinking of coming here.

Of course, that signal already got sent when Mamdani tapped Khan, the former Federal Trade Commission chief famed for warring on companies simply because they’re successful, for his transition team.

Yes, Khan and the rest of the Trotskyite trio insist they’re not anti-business, but their consensus that the existence of billionaires is one of America’s biggest problems says otherwise.

Because it assumes billionaires did something wrong to make all that money — when in fact they did many things right to convince others to voluntarily pay them for goods and services that wouldn’t exist without them.

The first problem with Mamdani’s plan to “tax the rich” is that the rich, more than anyone else, have options. They can — and do — flee.

And they don’t just take their money with them: They carry off countless opportunities for other people to get ahead.

Most US mayors do their damnedest to appeal to businesses to come and set up shop in their communities; the cities whose leaders do otherwise keep losing ground.

New York holds a far lower share of the nation’s wealthiest than it did a decade or two ago, and has lost a whole lot of entire industries.

We’re well down the path of losing the last real golden goose: Wall Street.

JP Morgan Chase — formed by two companies once definitively core New York City firms — now has more employees in Texas than in New York.

Florida, which like Texas has no state income tax, is becoming the prime location for hedge funds and private equity firms.

Other companies are scaling back, too, or choosing never to come here at all.

And why should they? Mamdani is open about believing that enterprise is a scam and successful people are simply good thieves.

Indeed, he’s called for jacking up the state corporate tax from 7.5% to 11.5% to match New Jersey’s rate — and Gov. Kathy Hochul is open to it, though it’d make New York’s overall businesses taxes markedly heavier than Jersey’s.

Saying it with a smirk fools no one; vowing to make billionaires weep is still a declaration of war on productivity and progress.

Long before Zoh & Co. can manage to make even one billionaire shed a single tear, their approach will slam a lot of far less wealthy people — with ordinary New Yorkers crying most of all.