Mayor Mammyjammy says, like he has the least inkling.

Mamdani Unveils Innovative Plan to Tax New Yorkers to Pay for Their Low-Cost Groceries
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.

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.”

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.

Not one of these collectivist/authoritarian/totalitarian jackwagons ever seems to be at all interested in asking the most obvious, common-sensical questions of themselves as regards their proven-failure program. Why, one might almost conclude they’re frightened to death of the answers or sumpin’.