Comrade Zohran Mamdani, the Communist Twelver-Shi’ite Mayor of New York, on Tuesday unveiled his plan for government-run grocery stores as if they were actually a good thing. Dear Mayor, who always has the best interests of The People at heart, has set aside $70 million for this foray into government-sanctioned theft and redistribution, and says that this exercise in vote-buying and making people dependents of the state will be operational in late 2027. So there’s something to look forward to, at least if you’re in the habit of collecting signposts on the highway to civilizational destruction.
Fox News reported Tuesday that Mamdani has threatened, uh, that is, promised, “to open one such store in each borough,” and said that “the city will subsidize basic grocery items while a private operator runs the stores under city rules requiring lower prices.” Most of the people who read that sentence likely came away thinking that the city would cover some of the cost of some grocery items, so that they would be cheaper for New Yorkers to buy.
That is, however, not the case, and that’s the dirty trick of socialism. The city government of New York, like all other governments everywhere, doesn’t produce anything that anyone wants to buy. It only has money because it confiscates that money from people who have worked and sweated and expended their energy to earn it. Socialism claims to be the politics of justice and equity, when actually it is the politics of envy and theft. Mamdani’s highly touted grocery stores will not provide low-cost items by rewarding people more fairly for their labors, but by rewarding some people less fairly for their labors so that others who did not labor at all can enjoy the benefits.
That’s how socialism works. That’s how it always works, and always has worked, and that’s why it always fails. As Mamdani himself quoted Margaret Thatcher the other day (in the process of trying and failing to refute her), “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
In full socialist states, high walls and guards with machine guns keep the productive people from fleeing, and the threat of the gulag keeps them working. In Mamdani’s New York, the productive people will grow tired of paying for everyone’s groceries, and will leave the city. Unless Mamdani can figure out a way to tax everyone who has ever lived in New York City, his socialist grocery stores will fail.
Mamdani, however, is all for trying the socialist “experiment” again anyway, despite unanimously negative results. “New York City,” he said with grandiose ebullience, “it is time for a grand experiment once again, just as LaGuardia used government to respond to the challenges of the Great Depression, we will use government to respond to rising prices and unaffordable groceries.”
It’s time for the socialist experiment again? Really? Millions killed and millions more in the gulags weren’t enough? The killing fields of Democratic Kampuchea weren’t enough? The failed economies of the entire Soviet bloc weren’t enough? This is like doing a basic science experiment for the umpteenth time and wondering if it will come out differently this time: will the boiling water not become steam this time? No, the same thing will happen that happened all the other times. Socialism will fail again.
Mamdani explained: “Now, here’s how it works. The city will subsidize a core set of staples. A private operator will run the store, but the answer to the standards that the city will set these standards include requirements that at our stores, bread will be cheaper, eggs will be cheaper, grocery shopping will no longer be an unsolvable equation, and workers will be treated with dignity.”
Related: Comrade Mamdani Gets to Work on His Cult of Personality
That’s swell, but here is how it works also: The stores will quickly run out of the low-cost items, as the demand will far exceed the supply. After all, who doesn’t want free stuff? There will be long, long lines to get virtually anything at these stores, and after they run for a while, those who are paying for them will go broke or leave the city or both, and they will collapse. If you’re skeptical about this, note that this was exactly what happened to city-run grocery stores in Kansas City, and much of it happened also in New York City itself when a private firm ran a week-long experimental low-cost grocery store back in February.
Mamdani declared: “The difference in this approach is that we are not hoping for affordability. We’re guaranteeing affordability in the contract we will have with a private operator.” But really, his ability to guarantee affordability depends upon the economic power of the tax base he is preparing to gouge. That is, once again, how the “grand experiment” works.
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