Government Stores in NYC? Yes! | The American Spectator

Count me all in for the mayoral candidacy of Zohran Mamdani in New York City. Mamdani is a literal democratic socialist — a member of the inane Democratic Socialists of America, a group I’ve detailed for years at The American Spectator. The DSA bills itself as the “largest socialist organization in the United States,” with over 80,000 members (described by the DSA as “comrades”) and with chapters in every state and on hundreds of college campuses. The DSA has given us some of Congress’s worst crazies, from Congressgirl Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the terrible Ilhan Omar to the bawling, hysterical Rashida Tlaib, among others. They were the core of the “Squad.”

Gee, who would have imagined that?

I’ve reported on the DSA strategy of working with the likes of the Justice Democrats and Cenk Uygur to target traditional Democrats in overwhelmingly liberal-Democrat districts during Democratic Party primaries. These DSA candidates, by and large, were not members of the Democratic Party until they sought public office. The Democratic Party is their Trojan horse to power. (READ MORE from Paul Kengor: More Democratic Socialists in Congress)

As Cenk Uygur has said, if they can elect “dozens” of AOCs and Ilhan Omars, “people will freak the hell out.” Their goal is to hijack the Democratic Party and push it to the far left. And they’re doing a damned good job of that, which brings me back to Mamdani.

Zohran Mamdani won the New York City Democratic primary on Tuesday as a far-left socialist running against the traditional party candidate, who happened to be Andrew Cuomo. As I’ve detailed here, Cuomo is known around Albany as the “Kissing Bandit.” His media mafia did its best to cover up for the notorious Luv Gov, but eventually, even his liberal sycophants turned on him. Andrew blamed his groping of female co-workers on his Italian upbringing, where hugging and kissing were part of the family culture. For this claim, I called Andrew a “chooch” — borrowing a term from our mutual Italian family ancestry. It’s a word that derives from the Italian ciuccio, which means “jackass” but more directly translates into “baby-pacifier.” (READ MORE from Paul Kengor: Andrew Cuomo’s Media Mafia and The Cuomo Mafia Strikes Again)

As for Mamdani, he benefited from a surge of support from dopey young people who understandably don’t like the corrupt Cuomo but who also think they like socialism because they don’t understand socialism. Mamdani won the primary by promising them everything from rent control to a $30 per hour minimum wage.

The democratic socialist’s proposals are predictably idiotic. And yet, Mamdani spoon-feeds his nostrums with a smile — what the Manhattan intelligentsia calls “charisma.” But in truth, anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of economics and of, well, common sense, laughs out loud while listening to Mamdani excitedly blather his first-grader’s interpretation of the world.

That brings me to my personal favorite of Mamdani’s goofy proposals. It is so howlingly outrageous that just for kicks — and to kick every wokester who voted for him in the pants — I would like to see it become a reality on the streets of New York. I’m talking about his plan for “government stores.”

Yes, Government Stores!

Heretofore, Americans have associated government stores with places like, oh, the old Soviet Union, Bulgaria, East Germany, Venezuela, Havana, Pyongyang. Needless to say, in those places, such stores were infamous for a lack of everything, as drab, depressed denizens of Marxism queued up for their monthly rations. But like a true socialist, Mamdani learned no lesson from that. In fact, as a product of American schools, he probably never had a single lesson on it. (RELATED: The Fourth Era Comes to the Big Rotten Apple)

At Bowdoin College, Mamdani majored in something called “Africana Studies,” and worse, his father is a professor at the dread Columbia University (also in African studies), all of which means that he would have learned nothing about the rot of socialism. He actually hails from Uganda, and Mamdani seems to be prescribing Ugandan economic policies for the Big Apple, though one wonders if even Idi Amin (another big fan of socialism) would have chuckled at any attempt to bring government stores to NYC.

But as a faithful socialist, Mamdani knows that the dream never dies. Utopia is always within reach, if only the right people can seize power and your tax dollars.

And thus, the wide-eyed socialist is calling for five huge city-owned grocery stores, one in each borough, neatly centrally planned, which he says would magically lower the cost of food. He speaks of these marvels in a wondrous, AOC-like, school-girlish way, gushing at the horizon of possibilities that your government could bring.

To that end, as I said, I would really love to see Mamdani’s dream enacted for a little while as a wake-up call to the hopelessly woke. When I walk around the streets of New York, I’m always awestruck at the spectacle of liberals thronging restaurants, cafes, pubs, and untold numbers of high-end shops that stand as incredible testimony to the extraordinary productive power of free markets, which happens to be the very thing these “progressives” vote against. Their intellectual disconnect from the realities abounding around them is a sight to behold. They sit in coffee shops with laptops adorned with stickers proclaiming “Resist Capitalism” or “Support Socialism,” oblivious to the fact that everything they’re enjoying daily is a product not of socialism but capitalism. It never ceases to amaze me.

As for the stores teeming around them, these left-wingers pack into monuments to free markets such as, say, the impressive Trader Joe’s on the Upper West Side (replete with escalators) down the street from Columbus Circle, with no awareness that free markets have given them such vast choices.

Well, alas, under Zohran Mamdani’s proposal, their beloved Trader Joe’s and every other store would be forced to compete with government-created stores. Such entities, being owned and run by the government, will be nowhere near as successful. However, they’ll have a massive advantage, namely: an unlimited largesse of tax money to suckle from. The government stores will be unmitigated failures kept from completely failing because they’ll be backed and bailed out by the government — by tax dollars taken from citizens’ paychecks. When private-sector stores suffer from inflation and competition, they struggle and sometimes go out of business. Government, however, faces no such threat. So long as Big Brother backs the public-sector entity, the entity never dies. If your private-sector operation goes bankrupt, you exit the marketplace. When the government goes bankrupt, it gets reelected and gets more money.

It’s quite the “competitive” advantage.

Of course, over time, Mamdani’s giant government stores would inevitably degenerate into empty, cavernous boondoggles — massive eyesores for all to see as testimonies to the moral-financial decrepitude of “democratic socialism.”

It would be deliciously amusing to watch young liberal New Yorkers slowly see the stupidity of what they voted for. It might even eventually dawn on them that this is dumb because democratic socialism is dumb. Well, maybe.

Let the spectacle of Zohran Mamdani’s government stories begin!

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