New York could learn something from Texas

 Austin Prochko:

New York mayoral candidate—and self-proclaimed democratic socialist—Zohran Mamdani has promised to open government-run grocery stores in New York if elected.

Why? Because of the high grocery prices.

Let’s not kid ourselves—even though the economy is recovering under Trump and grocery prices are going down, groceries can still be obscenely expensive in New York. Mamdani’s recent campaign ad flashes a couple numbers on the screen: $16.08, $19, even $21. I’m not sure what product these prices are for, but poking around the websites of New York City grocers, this Texan had to do a double take—basics like bread, milk, and eggs often were often double or more what I pay for down here.

So Mamdani, like many socialists (and even Marx himself), is accurately identifying a problem—unaffordable groceries. It’s just his solution that goes off the rails.

America has a long history of flirting with socialism, especially in the Northeast and specifically in New York. One of the key Supreme Court cases on the First Amendment is Gitlow v. New York (1925), which specifically deals with whether cities and states can punish communists and socialists for distributing pamphlets that advocate the overthrow of our way of government and foment a communist revolution.

Of course, socialism has never truly taken hold in America—although we see it here and there with government programs such as Medicaid, Social Security, and the like—but we can look throughout history to see examples of where socialism and communism have failed.

However, Mamdani isn’t advocating pure socialism—at least, not yet. He’s just talking about government-run grocery stores—a “public option,” like government-run public schools, government-run health care, and other ideas that have already been in existence in America for decades.

Unluckily for Mamdani, we can look to two specific example areas where government-run groceries go wrong.

The first is the most obvious: In Soviet Russia, throughout the Warsaw Pact, and in other communist and socialist countries, we saw government-run grocery stores that promised to bring down prices—and they did.

The problem was that while the groceries were cheap, there simply weren’t very many of them. Bread and food lines would stretch around whole city blocks, and people would wait hours or even days for a chance to get the “affordable” groceries. A second-hand black market quickly popped up, and its illegal nature only served to drive grocery prices higher—but at least you could get food when you needed it, if you could afford it.

But a second example of government-run food supply going wrong exists, and it exists outside the history of communism—and it happened over 2,000 years ago.

In the Second Century B.C., the city of Rome was in crisis. Its wars of expansion had gone well, and Rome was bursting at the seams with population—but the year’s harvest had gone bad, and, in the face of scarcity, grain prices skyrocketed.

So, a politician who fancied himself a “champion of the people”—the plebians, specifically—saw an opportunity. Gaius Gracchus proposed a system by which the Roman government would buy grain, then sell an allotted amount at below market price to eligible adult male citizens below a certain wealth threshold.

This solved the immediate crisis—starving plebs—and catapulted Gracchus’s career. But the “grain dole” quickly became very, very expensive and the high taxation required to support it, combined with his other reforms, eventually destroyed his popularity, caused riots, and led to his death.

The grain dole persisted as an early form of welfare on and off for decades and was combined with big public games paid for by the government or politicians—the famous “panem et circenses” (bread and circuses) of Rome. The taxes needed to support the bread and circuses necessitated that the Rome Republic always expand its rule and tax its outlying regions to pay for keeping its citizens in the city of Rome happy. Eventually, these taxes became a contributing factor in the collapse of the Roman Republic and establishment of the Roman Empire.
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In Texas, HEB sells groceries at a very competitive rate, and it has become a dominant provider.  It remains successful over several decades.  It is successful in large cities like Houston and in small communities across the state.