New in PJ Media:
Comrade Zohran Kwame Mamdani has been mayor of New York City for nearly eight weeks now, and he has not yet delivered on any of his lofty promises; instead, all New Yorkers have gotten out of his tenure so far is a lot of garbage in the streets. The cryptocurrency outfit Polymarket even beat the boy mayor to the punch on one of his campaign promises, opening up what it billed as “New York’s First Free Grocery Store.” The store was privately funded, not city-run, and only operated for five days, but that was plenty of time to demonstrate yet again that socialism, like Mamdani itself, doesn’t deliver on its promises, and only leaves people angry and disappointed.
Enthusiasm was initially high. Fox News reported Thursday that “in a busy stretch of restaurants and boutiques in the West Village, hundreds of New Yorkers queued up outside a pop-up shop offering free groceries.”
The people in the long queue, however, for the most part went away disappointed. New York’s First Free Grocery Store hit the wall of reality quite early in the day. One woman recounted: “I literally got here at 9:00 … and basically what they said is that they ran out of tickets.” The tickets were necessary to gain entry into the store, and just as grocery store shelves were so often empty in the old Soviet Union, New York’s First Free Grocery Store quickly ran out of tickets.
One man commented bitterly: “They told me that they ran out of tickets. I couldn’t get no more food.… I couldn’t get access to the store.” A security guard, clearly already weary with the charade only an hour after it started, shouted just after 9 a.m.: “Let’s go people, let’s go. Go home. Do not linger, do not look, do not watch. Please go home.”
It was a scene that could have unfolded in Moscow in 1980 or Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. Aside from the gulags, the line is the most distinguishing feature of socialist life. Even the New York Times wrote about it in 1985: “So common and pervasive are the lines that they have evolved their own etiquette, even their own slang. Shoppers in a busy store can have their place held in one line while they stand in another. Women with small children pass freely to the front. Other privileged people, ranging from disabled war veterans to recipients of the title ‘Hero of Socialist Labor,’ are also allowed to go to the head of the line. Goods, in this world, are ‘handed out,’ not sold, as if to underline that the issue is not one of cost or choice, but simply one of finding the stuff.”
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Taffy says
The comparison to Soviet Union stores is misplaced. The FREE New York City store was not government funded. Rather, it was a bunch of stupid people experimentally verifying what economics 101 should have taught them long ago. The New York City store was actually a free market, but the supply was at a price point, where the demand was limited only by how fast they could hand out tickets.
Communism in the former Soviet Union, on the other hand, had fixed prices for all the goods in the store. Unfortunately, the communist system could not produce enough goods to meet an inelastic demand curve, so the shelves ended up empty. The Soviet Union empty shelves were a systemic problem, not a poorly thought out experiment/publicity stunt.
If Mandani ever goes through with government, sponsored free stores, he will have the same problems for the same reasons as the former Soviet Union did.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
But the principle was the same: offering people something for nothing. It doesn’t really matter whether government offers it w/ taxpayer money, or some stupid private company offers it w/ their own: it’s simple. If you offer something that people usually buy for $0.00, there will be a huge demand for whatever it is you’re giving away. Markets know this, and so they put a price that some people will afford, and then they don’t see those lines, and at the end of the transaction, everybody goes away happy
On the flip side, let’s say that the government starts a company that sells some widget that is in high demand, and prices it high enough so that all their employees get a cut, and then manages to sell some. It would have done a good job. Only thing: governments don’t work that way due to Milton Friedman’s observation that spending somebody else’s money on somebody else will ensure that the spender neither cares about how much money is spent, nor does s/he care about the value for money
I also don’t think that this company was completely stupid. They probably knew what would happen as far as demand went, which is why this store was only there for 5 days and not more
Taffy says
What you say is true with respect to demand, but the supply curve with respect to the government furnishing the goods and the supply curve for a one-week publicity stunt have some differences depending on the method of furnishment.
Normally, the intersection of the supply and the demand curve sets the price. But when stuff is free and there is a demand for it, division by zero becomes a problem, so things end up being governed by how many tickets they can give away until the goods represented by the number of tickets equals what they have on hand to give away. Presumably, the tickets limit the amount of merchandise one can walk away with.
For government supplied goods, the communist USSR system had its production and distribution inefficiencies in supplying grocery store items. This leads to a very inelastic supply curve and the shelves go bare as soon as the people clean them out, especially if the store price of the goods are set below the communist market to March a hypothetical free market, which they always were.
I believe that Mamdani’s plan is to have an adequate supply of groceries, but give them away for free while limiting the quantities one can take. People will end up taking stuff that they don’t need, simply because it is free, and the taxpayer will end up footing the bill for this boondoggle. The government paying for everything is an externality whose cost must be accounted for, and when it js accounted for, the total cost of this boondoggle is far more that the free market cost.
John Pepple says
Everyone should look at academia to see how socialism doesn’t work. Academia is almost completely controlled by leftists, yet the people at the bottom (the adjuncts) are exploited, with stories of some of them living out of their cars. Meanwhile, people at the top make well over $100K per year and get lots of grants and other perks. Aren’t those people at the top supposed to be sharing their wealth? Don’t they believe in redistributions? Oh, yes, so long as it’s the other guy’s wealth that is being confiscated.
The whole situation is a scandal, really, though no one but me seems to want to talk about it. But for well over a century, the left has complained about exploited workers, but when they had a chance to show the world how to deal with the problem, they didn’t do any better than the corporate bosses they hate so much.
I went into academia supporting socialism, and I came out supporting capitalism.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Unfortunately, it’s more often than not the other way. Kids enter college, then learn socialism, come out of it, and then discover how socialism really works in real life. In the past, they would morph into capitalists, but in the last 2 decades, kids have only been taught what to think, not how to think. End result is today’s woke youth, who have also succeeded in making their employers woke as well
Mo says
I had not thought about that fact regarding the different kinds of professors. Wow. Keep talking about it wherever you can! You have firsthand experience that these ideas do not work in the real world. The world needs to hear that!
gravenimage says
The actual day to day teaching at the undergraduate level at most universities is done by TAs (teaching assistants), who are paid little or sometimes nothing, and hours spent teaching just go to their earning TAs’ advanced degrees. In the worst cases actual Professors pay little attention to teaching undergraduates at all–it varies.
Hindu American says
Free-loaders beware. Check the expiration dates on those Pregos.
Mo says
I somehow had not heard about this. Hilarious! Only small children think anything is free. How do these people function day to day in the real world? Don’t they work and pay bills and buy things for their daily lives? I genuinely don’t understand how any adult can think things can be “free.” Where do they think the food comes from? The sky? It just magically appears? Somebody help me out here, because I don’t understand!
LS says
Lots of things are free. They’re paid for by taxes and certain individuals or groups (the sick, the elderly, etc,) get them for free. There’s nothing wrong with that and no country can function without social services of some kind.
gravenimage says
New York’s First Free Grocery Store Shows Yet Again That Socialism Doesn’t Work
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This is *not* a “free grocery store”–at best it is a food bank, and does not appear to be anywhere near as efficiently run.
LS says
It’s really time to retire the “Socialism Never Works” slogan, because it’s simply not true. No country can function without some degree of socialism, which is just public, taxpayer-funded programs. In the US that means Medicare, The US Military and the great GI Bill, the Public school system including State colleges and universities and your local Police department.
gravenimage says
It worked so well in the Soviet Union… sarc/off
Ralph says
Mumdummy announced today that he wants to spend $70,Million to study the feasibility of his government-run grocery store.
David Lakatos says
Comme Muslim. Pure satanic