Posted on 04/21/2026 5:34:57 AM PDT by MtnClimber
When I consider our new Mayor Mamdani and his legions of committed followers, the thought I can’t get away from is “How is it possible to be this ignorant?”
Right now here in New York, Mamdani is moving forward with his plan to open a chain of government-owned grocery stores, at least one for each of our five boroughs. The underlying concept is that groceries have become too expensive for low income people to buy, undoubtedly due to evil capitalists siphoning off vast profits somewhere in the system. In the latest iteration of his proposal, Mamdani has said that the government stores will sell “basic” products like bread, milk and eggs at “guaranteed cheaper” prices. From the New York Post, April 14:
“When it comes to the products that we will be selling at the city-run grocery stores, there will be an essential basket of goods that will be guaranteed a cheaper price, and cheaper than what they’re being sold at currently,” Mamdani said during a news conference at La Marqueta in Harlem.
And yet, in the collection of real world evidence that has been accumulated over the last 100 years or so as to whether socialism can ever work, there is no case of more overwhelming evidence of socialism’s failure than the case of grocery stores. Do Mamdani and his sycophants not know about this?
The Soviet Union was famous for its sad empty grocery stores, often with little or even no inventory, and long lines that would form every time there was a rumor that some food would be available. This was universally known (among those who paid attention) to be the case into the 1980s, going on seventy years since the Communist state had been formed on the promise of abundance for all.
In 1989 Boris Yeltsin — then a rising star in Soviet politics and a new member of the Politburo, just as the state was beginning to fall apart — made a trip to Houston, Texas. The main purpose of the trip was to visit the Johnson Space Center, but somehow Yeltsin made an impromptu visit to a Randall’s supermarket. Pictures of that visit were widely circulated at the time. Here is one:
In his autobiography “Against the Grain” published the next year (1990), Yeltsin wrote:
“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. . . . That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.”
OK, Mamdani was born in 1991. But can he just maintain complete ignorance about everything that happened before that year, even universally-known things that happened just two years previously?
And it’s not like the phenomenon of empty grocery stores in socialist countries has gone away. Look around on the internet, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of images available of empty grocery store shelves in socialist paradises like Cuba and Venezuela. But even that’s nothing compared to North Korea, where they have periodic famine years where hundreds of thousands of people (or maybe it’s millions) starve to death.
It’s no mystery why goods disappear from grocery store shelves when the prices are subsidized. As soon as goods are being sold for below-market prices, then everybody who works in the system can enrich themselves by buying at the subsidized prices (before the public gets a chance) and re-selling on a black market. All the store clerks, delivery people, cashiers, shelf stockers, and so forth, get to the goods before the public can, and the goods disappear. The system insiders then consume the goods themselves, or sell to their friends. This is natural human behavior, and nobody has yet figured out a way to stop it. Mamdani won’t do better than anyone else.
For more on this subject, I recommend my post from August 2016 titled “Why Capitalism Works And Socialism Doesn’t: Arbitrage.” Excerpt:
If you can buy something cheaply and immediately turn around and sell it for more, chances are you will do it. Why shouldn't you? Is there something wrong with that? This is completely normal and pervasive human behavior. This behavior is also a source of a very large percentage of the wealth in wealthy countries where such behavior is permitted. It is also the reason why, in market economies, comparable things almost always trade for very comparable prices.
It goes on from there. I would recommend the piece to Mamdani, but of course he won’t read it.
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Mamdami’s Plan is not to have a working grocery business. It is to transfer wealth by having the taxpayers fund store operations and products for the underclass to shoplift with impunity, while creating overpaid patronage jobs for store operators.
30 million??? to create a grocery store?
I could open 30 stores for 30 million.
Are they selling stuff? Or just giving it away?
Even a government run grocery store will have to have a checking account. When that checking account has no money in it, Mamdani will transfer money from a government account to cover the hot checks but pretty soon that source of funds will have to stop too. Then, Mamdani will call Trump! Wasn’t it Gerald Ford that told New York to “drop dead”.
Mamdani may be a gifted con artist, but be assured that he hasn’t foold everybody. His ideas so far have been pretty much dead ends. For those who voted for him...well, I guess that’s what they wanted or were not smart enough to see where it would all end up.
NYC has Aldis.
I don’t think milk and eggs can be rationally sold for less than Aldi does generally.
The French have stores that sell wonderful French bread. It doesn’t keep. Getting it to the consumer fast is the key to quality.
What New Yorkers need most is cheaper rent.
If landlords could get their buildings repaired cheaper it would help a great deal.
Scan your embedded chip, plebs, for your “FREE” groceries.
They weren’t called “useful idiots” for nothing.
Just what is wrong with him?
I was in law school, taking a course on Soviet Constitutional and Legal History in the fall of 1991, as the subject matter was disappearing. In fact, during the week break between the end of the semester and the final exam (approx. December 20), the CCCP dissolved.
Near the end of the Soviet era, early in December, the NYT reported on the absurd disparities between black-market prices on the streets of Moscow and the official, centrally planned prices set by the state. Impossible to forget from that article was the fact that 6 quarts of black-market Finnish milk on the street in Moscow sold for the same price as the centrally planned price of an Aeroflot flight from the westernmost airport in the country to Vladivostok, 13 time zones to the east.
(Scan your embedded chip, plebs,
for your “FREE” groceries.)
AND turn in
Your Neighbors
Your Friends
Your Family
If those people don’t have the Mark of the Beast 666
Turn those Bible-Believers in
for Arrest and Execution by
the Satanic New World Order Government
(Fourth Beast of Daniel 7:23)
Matthew 24:9-11
English Standard Version
9 “Then they will deliver you up to Tribulation
and put you to Death,
and you will be hated by all nations
for My Name’s sake.
10 And then many will fall away
and betray one another
and hate one another.
11 And many false prophets will arise
and lead many astray.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2024%3A9-11&version=ESV
re: the headline...
Never, ever underestimate a liberal’s ignorance.
Mamdamimi's a piker. Newscum's High Speed Rail sets the bar.
Imagine a dirty, stinky Aldis crammed with illegals. 😏
And the project, while it lasts, will cost 10 times as much as the politicians promised.
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