The post When Foucault met the ayatollah appeared first on spiked.

Late last year, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul vetoed a bill that would have required two-person operating crews on New York City subways, despite heavy pressure from transit unions. While the veto looked like a win for fiscal sanity, two-person train crews—and needlessly expensive transit systems—are likely here for the foreseeable future.

The bill, which would have mandated both a driver and a conductor on each train, cleared the state Legislature somewhat unexpectedly last year. It was pushed by the Transport Workers Union (TWU) to permanently codify more union jobs into state law.

Most NYC subway lines already operate with two-person crews under the current labor contract between the TWU and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Hochul's veto stopped two-person crews from spreading systemwide, and it theoretically left the door open for the topic to be renegotiated in future labor talks, rather than being cemented into state law.

NYC's two-person system is a global outlier. An analysis from New York University's Marron Institute of Urban Management found that just 6 percent of the world's commuter rail lines use two-person crews, with most operating safely with a single driver for decades.

Although unions insist two-person crews are essential for safety, evidence suggests otherwise. The Manhattan Institute's Adam Lehodey has documented that London, which uses one-person crews, operates one of the safest rail networks in the world. Research from the Association of American Railroads, which compared one-person trains in Europe to America's multiperson freight train system, similarly found no evidence of a safety impact.

But, as TWU President John Samuelsen told The New York Times, "It doesn't really matter to us what the data shows," adding that a driver and a conductor make trips "visibly safer."

The fight over crew size extends beyond New York. Under President Joe Biden, the Federal Railroad Administration enacted a rule mandating two-person crews for freight trains nationwide. While one might expect this rule to be repealed in a Republican administration, the GOP's continued bear hug with organized labor has muddied the waters.

President Donald Trump's Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and FRA Administrator David Fink both voiced support for the Biden-era two-person crew rule during their confirmation hearings. During his time in the Senate, Vice President J.D. Vance co-sponsored—along with numerous other Republicans, including Sen. John Hawley (R–Mo.) and then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.)—the Railway Safety Act, which would have legislatively mandated two-person freight crews.

The contradiction is especially stark in rail policy, as Trump recently fired numerous Surface Transportation Board members, presumably in an effort to greenlight railroad mergers—the type of pro-railroad stance that collides with the administration's pro-union crew-size priors.

Beyond failing to improve safety, two-person crews are substantially more expensive. Switching to one-person crews would save the MTA $442 million a year. That money could fund real safety improvements, such as the installation of platform doors, which provide a physical barrier between passengers and the train until the train has come to a complete stop. After platform doors were installed in Seoul, South Korea, annual subway deaths dropped from 70 to two.

If anything, Hochul's veto merely gives new NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani more flexibility in future labor negotiations between the TWU and the MTA. Based on the mayor's track record, it's unlikely he'll be a voice for one-person crews.

Given likely political support from both City Hall and the White House, two-person crews appear entrenched—and riders will keep paying for them.

The post Why Can't New York Get Rid of 2-Person Subway Crews? appeared first on Reason.com.

Friedrich Nietzsche rejected liberal individualism, capitalism, egalitarianism, and peace—and he embraced struggle, hierarchy, and the ‘will to power.’ His philosophy was appropriated by the National Socialists—in some ways accurately and in some ways via misinterpretation. Captainese’s interview with Professor Stephen Hicks. Timestamps: 1:34 Do philosophers have a responsibility to prevent the misuse of their ideas? […]

"Replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism!" says my new socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

Sounds so nice.

No more greedy capitalists hoarding wealth. People share. It's the socialist dream.

What will replace capitalism and individualism? One model is the commune—that socialist system where people share, rather than greedily chasing money.

In my new video, TikTokers claim capitalism is "ending." They sing about the beauty of communes. One asks, desperately, "Where is my commune?!"

Good question. They're hard to find because they keep failing.

One of the most famous was founded in 1825 in New Harmony, Indiana. Private property was banned and residents shared everything.

The result?

After just two years, most residents left.

Today, New Harmony is a tourist attraction, meant to "inspire progressive thought," says the assistant director of the expensively renovated site. "It just has some magic here."

But New Harmony's magic only exists today because a nepo baby poured her rich father's money into it. Robert Blaffer started Humble Oil, which became ExxonMobil. After his death, his daughter spent millions of her father's dollars turning the failed commune into an expensive museum.

The "magic" tourists experience in New Harmony comes from capitalism, the only system that creates lasting wealth.

The "warmth of collectivism" fails again and again.

It's failing now in Cuba, North Korea, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

It was tried and abandoned in the Soviet Union, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Benin, the Congo, Somalia, Grenada, and Cambodia.

Even China and Vietnam's leaders, to allow their countries to prosper, felt they had to give up pure socialism and allow private property and capitalism.

But my new mayor still wants to give "the warm of collectivism" a shot.

If he were my age, he would have been a hippie. Hippie communes were popular then.

One in Tennessee called The Farm forbade members to have their own money or property. Everyone shared everything.

"Mothers would nurse each other's babies—other parents would take care of you," said a former member.

"If you want to become a member of the community," warned The Farm's lawyer, "you got to put everything you have in the pot. We're doing this for a lifetime!"

But they couldn't do it for a lifetime. They couldn't even keep it for a dozen years.

There just wasn't enough money, says the commune's bookkeeper: "Everybody was saying…there's not enough food, not enough vegetables, not enough diapers, shoes. All things the children needed."

Only when the commune allowed members to own things, and keep profit from their labor, was The Farm able to survive.

Residents now say, "We're not socialists anymore. We have our own money."

New York's Oneida Community was founded as a free-love, socialist commune, where "every man in the community was essentially married to every woman and all the property was shared."

But Oneida survives today only because they dropped socialism and became capitalists, selling expensive Oneida silverware.

Likewise, an Iowa commune, Amana Colonies, survives because they abandoned socialism to sell appliances.

Some Americans (falsely) think Israeli communes, Kibbutzim, succeeded. But they mostly failed, despite getting heavy taxpayer subsidies. Why?

Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute explains, "People envied one another…and treated one another really, really bad. It's obvious why. Some people worked hard. Others didn't. Yet they had exactly the same."

The surviving few Kibbutzim are capitalist. Members own property and earn their own money.

The "warmth of collectivism" doesn't last.

But socialists never admit that their communes fail.

"Because to them it's a moral ideal," says Brook. "Moral striving for the good, even though it's a complete disaster and a complete failure everywhere and anywhere it is tried."

No matter what my new mayor and other "progressives" say, the only thing that works—the only thing that really makes life better for people—is private ownership and capitalism.

COPYRIGHT 2026 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post Mamdani's Promise of the 'Warmth of Collectivism' Is a Lie. Just Ask All the Failed Communes. appeared first on Reason.com.

The current Washington tiff between Donald Trump and Jerome Powell is being reframed as Powell heroically defending the Fed’s “independence.” In truth, the Fed has always done the administration’s dirty work and pursued inflation when it might temporarily boost the economy.