In the days and weeks after democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani clinched the Democratic Party nomination in the New York City mayoral race, apocalyptic rumors began to swirl of the wealthy running for the hills. Jim Bianco, president of the financial analysis firm Bianco Research, warned that New York City was committing “suicide by mayor.” Billionaire Trump backer Bill Ackman warned of an exodus of elites who won’t tolerate the higher taxes for expanded public services that Mamdani proposes. Ackman offered to bankroll a Mamdani opponent on the pretext of saving the city from destruction should the rich leave and take their tax revenue with them.

Florida played an outsize role in the drama. The wealth concentration and financial activity in the Palm Beach–Miami corridor pales in comparison to New York, but a recent influx of rich New Yorkers has nevertheless popularized the idea of a “Wall Street South.” The Manhattan real estate broker and reality television star Ryan Serhant told the New York Post that his “number one job will be moving people from New York to Florida.” Ackman cited hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin’s decision to move the headquarters of Citadel from Chicago to Miami, warning that Mamdani would inspire the same effect “on steroids.” Governor Kathy Hochul took the bait, saying of Mamdani’s proposed tax hikes on the rich, “I don’t want to lose any more people to Palm Beach.”

New York City elites’ message is clear: tax our wealth, and we’ll just go be wealthy somewhere else. You have a problem with Wall Street? Try funding your precious public infrastructure projects and social programs after Wall Street relocates all of its bajillions to another state entirely.

These threats are no doubt overblown. In a study by the Fiscal Policy Institute, researchers Emily Eisner and Andrew Perry found that New York State’s millionaire population is actually growing, not shrinking, contradicting the Wall Street South narrative. The researchers examined two major tax increases, the 2017 federal SALT cap and New York’s 2021 millionaire tax. They found no increase in high-earner outmigration following these policies. When wealthy New Yorkers do leave, most of them move to other high-tax states like Connecticut, New Jersey, and California rather than low-tax destinations like Florida.

Moving is often logistically complicated and extremely expensive. For example, Griffin’s Citadel deal has involved over $1.3 billion in real estate expenses, to say nothing of pricey employee relocation. Griffin has sold his own properties in Chicago at major losses. Rich people usually don’t want to bother with all of that. They have prime real estate they don’t want to sell and career and social networks they don’t want to abandon. Most would rather bite the bullet than incur the costs and risks of relocation. Fortune argues this point, observing that Wall Streeters grumbled about Bill de Blasio’s election in 2013, too, but no exodus was forthcoming.

On the other hand, we can’t dismiss the threat of capital disinvestment altogether. The rich do have a tipping point where the costs of staying outweigh the costs of moving. They frequently decide that moving costs can be offset by savings in a more favorable business climate; see the relocation of factories from the union-friendly North to the union-hostile South, or across national borders. In rarer cases, capitalists willingly eat short-term costs in order to squash left-wing political agendas that they consider an existential threat. This is precisely what happened in François Mitterrand’s France and Salvador Allende’s Chile, where economic elites felt so under siege by socialist administrations that they opted to ruin the economy through disinvestment, hurting their own bottom lines in the process, in order to restore pro-capitalist political conditions.

Rich people are probably not going to leave New York City in droves if Zohran Mamdani raises their taxes by 2 percent, institutes a rent freeze, and launches an experiment with municipally run grocery stores. However, it’s not impossible to imagine the scenario being invoked here. Left-wing politics do come with risks of both capital flight, which occurs when businesses and investors relocate in search of greener pastures (lower taxes, looser regulation, and cheaper labor), and capital strikes, when capitalists stop investing in order to inflict economic pain and bring an administration to its knees.

If the unlikely worst-case scenario did occur and Mamdani’s progressive policies generated enough discontent to spur significant elite outmigration, tax revenue would shrink, jobs would disappear, and the local economy would suffer as a consequence, which voters would no doubt pin on Mamdani and democratic socialism writ large. It probably won’t happen, but it can happen, and it has happened. Thus we are compelled to take the threat of capitalist disinvestment seriously.

Capital flight is an important political and economic question for anyone thinking about legislating as a leftist. But rarely do we take a step back to consider what it means to live under such a regime.

Because of capitalists’ colossal structural power, we’re required to stroke the egos and soothe the anxieties of tantrum throwing elites every time we want to improve society. If we want better education, healthcare, and childcare programs, or to fix our own crumbling infrastructure, or to make our own cities affordable to live in, we are structurally compelled to consider the interests and feelings of the ultrarich, to beg permission from the most wantonly unethical and pathologically narcissistic people on earth.

If that seems like an overstatement, consider Bill Ackman, who has offered to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to fund a Mamdani opponent in the general election. “The risk/reward of running for mayor over the next 132 days is extremely compelling as the cost in time and energy is small and the upside is enormous,” Ackman said of his offer.

The arrogance is astounding: never mind democracy, Ackman personally knows what’s best for New York City, and he also knows that there are opportunists looking to advance their careers in politics who would relish his easily won financial support, and he finds no shame in broadcasting either position. He doesn’t like the outcome. He would like a new one and is willing and able to pay handsomely for it.

We shouldn’t be surprised: this is the same Bill Ackman who, earlier this month, bought his way into a professional tennis match, which he lost, prompting mockery from the sport’s top athletes, in a spectacle that Corey Robin calls one of “extraordinary, remarkable, unfathomable vanity.” The same Bill Ackman who used his influence as a top Harvard donor and his public notoriety among fellow Trump supporters to oust Harvard President Claudine Gay for what he considered insufficient punishment of student Palestine solidarity activists.

Ackman made his billions by betting against companies during financial crises and pushing for predatory and extractive changes that boosted share prices and his own returns at the expense of workers and communities. He’s a vulture perched atop his carrion, lording his scavenged gains over us. And he’s profoundly annoying, making it especially depressing how often he gets his way.

This is not the arrangement of a free society. This is the stuff of kings and feudal lords ruling over serfs. It is not befitting a democracy. And for a country so devoted to the principle of freedom and so proud of our history of rejecting illegitimate monarchical authority, we should be pissed off about it. Americans shouldn’t have to grovel pathetically before oligarchs to prevent them from nuking our economy as punishment for trying to attain an infinitesimal fraction of the privilege they enjoy — privileges which, of course, are already more lopsidedly distributed to the wealthy than ever.

If he wins the general election, Madani will have to proceed carefully, calling the wealthy’s bluff enough to pass meaningful reforms without setting into motion a devastating process in which those bluffs become reality. The rest of us, though, should be clear about one thing: what we’re seeing now is a tiny minority trying to hold an entire city — an entire society — hostage to its own interests, using its structural leverage in the economy to undermine the democratic will of ordinary people.

Surely there’s a better economic and political system than one where we have to coddle these villains every time we want to raise the standard of living for the majority. We don’t have to put up with this.