Zohran, Tribune of the People, has at last unveiled his plan for government-owned grocery stores. The mountain has labored, and here is your mouse. At first glance, it appears to be a display program, something that will enable Mamdani to claim that he carried out his campaign promise without putting himself at political risk. Five stores scattered across the same number of boroughs, each with over a million inhabitants, is not very impressive. But whatever the number — five, five hundred, or five thousand — the scheme suffers from a crippling flaw that has been overlooked.
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Ya see, New Yawk is right next to Joisey. Yeah okay, there’s some water there, but they got tunnels that go right under it straight to Manhattan. So it’s like ten minutes away, tops. I mean, even Queens and Brooklyn, they ain’t more than like a half-hour, forty minutes away, right? So, Joisey being right next door, and everybody in the state thinking they’re in the Sopranos, what do ya think’s gonna happen?
Well, I’ll tell ya, playmates. Mamdani has stated that prices in the new city-owned people’s stores will be 30% under those of chain supermarkets. That is, chain supermarkets not only in NYC, but in New Jersey, Connecticut, and elsewhere. So those new Workers’ and Peasants’ Superstores will scarcely have opened their doors when they will be overwhelmed with nonresidents in the style of the locusts of scripture. And it won’t just be penny-pinching everyday Jerseyans. No — it will be restaurateurs seeking cheap supplies and, NJ being ground zero for gray-market goods, store owners buying mounds of stuff to mark up and sell at full price in their own trans-Hudson stores. Within minutes, the Zohranmarts will be cleaned out, with little of it going to locals, while the Holland and Lincoln tunnels are jammed with packed trucks.
Does Comrade Zohran have a solution to this? If he does, nobody has heard it. He could arrange for the stores to demand IDs, but as the Democrats have repeatedly explained, we’re dealing with people too primitive and uneducated to grasp what an ID is, much less how to get one. In any case, there are far too many ways to get around any such requirement. Pay off a bum, or a local kid, to go in and make the purchases for you. If not the staff itself, who could easily be persuaded to allow goods to fall off a truck. By the time it’s over, these supermarkets will have more regulations than a gun shop. In other words, it’ll look a lot like life in the USSR pre-1989.
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It works the same way in reverse. As Dave Rubin has pointed out, the goal of this program is to undercut and shut down privately-owned stores to ensure that the entire market is dominated by government-run outlets. So, with the shortages and rationing that always accompany socialism, what’s to stop people from hopping on the PATH train for Jersey City or Hoboken and doing their shopping there? What is Mamdani (or the central committee that takes over after he has been executed for neoliberal tendencies) going to do then? Set up checkpoints at the stations?
In the end, what it comes down to is the sheer impracticality and inefficiency of socialism. It doesn’t work, and it can’t be made to work. When you put it alongside the most slovenly, corrupt, and ill-run capitalist economy (like the one in New Jersey), it always loses. So let Mamdani play with his toy people’s supermarkets. Of course, that leaves us with all the starving New Yorkers, but… consequences.
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