Zohran Mamdani has a plan. And it’s not some wonky technocrat’s mind-numbing exercise in setting chloroform to print, either. No, Mamdani’s plan is fresh. It’s new. It’s daring. It has won him a good deal of support, as well as opposition from one of those billionaires he is always complaining about. So what’s not to like? Well, Mamdani’s bold new plan has just gained an unexpected and, in Mamdani’s circles, a formidable critic: New York’s own far-left governor, Kathy Hochul, has delivered a four-word knockout of Mamdani’s plan that is as succinct and precise as it is devastating. What got in to her?
Mamdani’s plan is the famous promise to help alleviate poverty by establishing city-owned grocery stories that will make goods available to New Yorkers at readily affordable prices. Mamdani looked out and saw that there were poor people, you see, and his response was not to conclude that some people are more talented than others, or that some people work harder than others do, or even that our welfare system today incentivizes habits that militate against people taking the initiative to better their own lives. Instead, he concluded, Marxist that he is, that problem here is that greedy capitalists are charging too much for food. And so he is going to open cheap, government-run grocery stores.
Gov. Hochul’s riposte came Saturday, when she attended a breakfast hosted by the billionaire supermarket magnate John Catsimatidis, who initially threatened to close his stores and leave the city if Mamdani becomes mayor, although he later said he would just scale back operations. Asked about Mamdani’s grocery scheme, Hochul said: “I favor free enterprise.”
Does she, now? She hasn’t exactly worked hard to make that clear during her gubernatorial tenure, but nevertheless, she was right. Anyone who knows what food stores are really like, and always have been like, in socialist regimes is more than skeptical of Mamdani’s promises. Remember when Boris Yeltsin came to America in 1989 and was shocked by the superabundance of the offerings at a grocery store in the Houston area? Yeltsin, having grown up under Soviet communism, was used to the kinds of grocery stores that Zohran Mamdani wants to bring to New York.
Catsimatidis pointed out that Mamdani’s plan had been tried in Kansas City, where the government-owned Sun Fresh Market just went belly-up last Monday, “after years,” according to the Post, “of being a huge money pit for taxpayers and being plagued by rampant shoplifting and empty shelves.” Catsimatidis commented: “New York City is a capitalist city – look what happened in Kansas City. These types of grocery stores just don’t work.”
Indeed they don’t, and the Post notes that “critics have said they fear Mamdani’s plan to create ‘Soviet’ markets would leave customers stuck with just one brand or generic brands of items like bread and milk.” Nevertheless, Mamdani has not walked back his plan, and says that he can set up five of these grocery stores, one in each borough, for just $60 million.
Mamdani has crowed about this, promising: “We will redirect city funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores whose mission is lower prices, not price-gouging.” The funds he says he will redirect are from “the city’s existing program called City FRESH, where they are set to spend $140 million, subsidizing corporate grocery stores… So we would take less than half of the money the city is already set to spend, and actually deliver results.”
Related: You Mean Zohran Mamdani May Not Be 100% Honest? Knock Me Over with a Feather!
Gee, that sounds swell. There’s just one snag: Timothy P. Carney of the American Enterprise Institute points out that Mamdani is wrong. The city did not spend $140 million to subsidize existing grocery stores, and does not plan to do so. Instead, the city gave some tax breaks to grocery chains to induce them to open stores in areas where there were no grocery stores. This led the grocery chains themselves invested $140 million in the city.
So Mamdani plans to pay for his government-run grocery stores by redirecting money from a program that he says exists, but actually does not. The money wasn’t spent, and the city doesn’t have it. If Mamdani really tries to follow through on his grocery store scheme, he will have to gouge New York City taxpayers even more than they are already being gouged in order to pay for it. That’s socialism for you. Hochul is right: free enterprise is far better.
