When the state begins to list its enemies by property

The Washington Examiner reports that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has advanced a registry of so-called pied-à-terre owners — citizens who hold a second home within city limits. The column's author draws an uncomfortable parallel: Stalin's early lists of kulaks, prosperous peasants, preceded dispossession, then famine, then death on a scale that staggers the conscience. I will not press that analogy to its most extreme conclusion; the situations are not identical in degree. But the shape of the instrument deserves our full attention, because the shape is always the same.

The power to compile a list of citizens organized by the character of their property is not a neutral administrative act. It is a political act — a declaration that this class of holder is suspect, that their ownership requires special justification before the state. Every tyranny in the long history of republics gone wrong has begun not with the dungeon but with the ledger. The ledger comes first. It gives the exercise of power the appearance of orderly procedure and strips the targeted citizen of the instinctive sympathy of his neighbors, who are invited to see him not as a fellow subject of liberty but as a category.

I confess I held an ambivalent view of concentrated property in my own time — I distrusted great accumulations of land when they smothered the small freeholder beneath them, and I still hold that a republic rests most securely on citizens who own what they labor over. But the remedy for unjust concentration is law applied equally and openly, through a legislature accountable to the whole people — not a registry administered by an executive that has decided in advance who is to be watched. The former is republican governance; the latter is something older and darker.

The writers of this Republic placed very specific prohibitions on bills of attainder precisely because they had seen — in the English Parliament, in revolutionary committees — how easily a governing body can dress punishment in the clothing of classification. A pied-à-terre registry is not, on its face, a bill of attainder. I mark that distinction. But it shares the same animating impulse: to identify a disfavored class by a characteristic they hold and subject them to a special burden that their neighbors do not bear. That impulse, once normalized in the governing culture of a city, does not confine itself to the class that first provoked it.

The citizen who cheers the list because he does not own a second home should ask himself one question: who decides what property category comes next? The answer is whoever holds the executive pen. If you would not trust your enemy with that pen, do not hand it to your friend. That is not a principle of the left or of the right; it is the plain lesson of every republic that lost itself — that the powers we build for our favorite causes are inherited by those who do not share them. The Washington Examiner's contributor is right to invoke history here, even if the comparison must be held with care. Vigilance costs nothing. Complacency has always cost everything.