The June 25 NY City rank-choice Mayoral Primary victory of Democrat (and socialist) state Assembly member Zohran Mamdani has been receiving applause for his economic policies in pop media circles.
Take, for example, CBS News, NY, which heralded his “community” organization and cozy message that stressed “affordability” – which, of course, is code for government welfarism and subsidies, price controls, and outright market diktats that actually don’t make anything more “affordable,” they redirect wealth, crush competition, and force decisions on struggling business people, damaging the keys of market interaction that really DO lead to more for less.
Reason’s Joe Lancaster noticed this anti-market component of Mamdani’s rhetoric, and recently offered us reminders of how these collectivist ideas already have been tried – and failed – in the form of government-run supermarkets.
“One proposal that galvanized both supporters and opponents was Mamdani's plan to open five city-owned grocery stores—one in each borough. In a campaign video, he called the stores a ‘public option’ like in health care; he said they would not pay rent or property taxes, they would ‘operate without a profit motive,’ and their ‘mission [would be] lower prices, not price gouging.’ (As of January 2025, the grocery industry's average net profit margin was under 2 percent.)”
Curiously, because privately-owned markets have to compete, and pay bills, and attract consumers without getting subsidies from taxpayers, they have to work to cut expenses, increase efficiency, and lower their prices. In a market economy, where government gets out of the way, people can have choices and turn to alternatives that are not either favored or slammed by political edicts.
The results of collectivism are always the same.
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Not only can one recall the Soviet Union’s mismanaged and consumer-challenging supermarkets, thousands of miles and decades away, but, as Lancaster notes, even this supermarket idea in the US has been tried and repeatedly failed.
“The city council in Erie, Kansas, purchased the city's only grocery store in 2020 rather than let it close. The city operated the Erie Market for years but at a loss: Erie's mayor said the average customer needed to spend $50 per month for the store to stay afloat, but the actual monthly expenditure was closer to $14. Last year, Erie leased out the store to be run by a private company.”
And, he writes:
“Baldwin, Florida, opened a fully government-owned grocery store in 2019 after the town's only grocer closed the previous year. The town already owned the site, having purchased the lot and funded the building's construction a decade earlier in an attempt to woo a grocer to town.
‘We're not trying to make a profit,’ Mayor Sean Lynch, a Republican, told The Washington Post when Baldwin Market opened. ‘We're trying to cover our expenses, and keep the store running.’”
But, of course:
“The store closed in 2024 after being in business for less than five years. ‘The town-run store,’ The Florida Times-Union wrote at the time, ‘has struggled for years…to reach the break-even point.’"
If a government-run system can continue bleeding off the taxpayer without sufficient attention to the reality of its parasitism and sloth, it will continue to do so.
This is not how one helps make life more affordable or “fair,” and it has been tried, over and over again, with the same results.
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