If you are any kind of news junkie, you’ve obviously heard of the outlandish platform of New York City Democrat mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, the self-described “Democrat Socialist” who proposals are Communistic by any other assessment.
Chief among the outlandishness of his platform – just ahead of a $30 minimum wage and free mass transit — is to open government-run grocery stores.
Pittsburgh keeps flirting with a hybrid of the concept – not government-run, necessarily, but certainly government- (i.e., public-; i.e., taxpayer-) funded grocery stores.
One would have thought the predictably failed Shop ‘n Save in the city’s Hill District would have sworn government-types off such addlepated interventionism. But it didn’t. And then came the predictably failed Salem’s Market in the same spot.
And we can almost guarantee that the city’s command economists, their tank of hubris still quite full, will try a similar failure-in-the-making for a third time, if not more.
What’s so exasperating about this push for government-financed and/or -operated grocery stores is that the economics case against the practice is quite elementary, as economist Don Boudreaux details in a letter sent last week to the editor of National Review magazine.
Don is the longtime professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. (He served as the department chair for a while).
Writes Boudreaux:
“There is no greater testament to the productive and economic-democratization powers of capitalism than modern American supermarkets.”
“For starters,” Boudreaux notes, citing a plethora of economists’ recitation of the facts, “grocery sellers’ profit margins are razor thin, testifying to that industry’s intense competition. This competition is surely a major contributor to the steady decline in Americans’ costs of feeding themselves.”
He cites the work of researchers Eliana Zeballos and Wilson Sinclair in noting that “over the past 60 years, the share of disposable personal income that Americans spend on food at home has steadily fallen.”
“Just under 12 percent in 1964, this share today is around 5 percent,” Boudreaux recounts. “This fall in food prices is all the more remarkable given that the government – an outfit that, according to Mr. Mamdani and other socialists, supplies the only hope of protecting the working class from capitalists’ predations – continues to enrich rich farmers by artificially buoying the prices of many agricultural products.”
And then there’s this little researchers’ factoid:
“Further evidence of competition in grocery retailing is this: In the 1950s the typical supermarket in the U.S. offered 6,000 items; today it offers 50,000,” Boudreaux writes.
But sans the data dump, Boudreaux notes that the most powerful evidence that private grocery stores work, and work quite well, comes from “personal investigation.”
“Walk into any supermarket. You’ll realize that even if your income is below average, there’s almost nothing offered in that remarkable emporium that you cannot easily afford,” he says. “Grapes in January from Chile; salmon from Nova Scotia, fresh or frozen as you like; an assortment of dry breakfast cereals almost too many to count; odor-suppressing trash bags with built-in ties; prepared foods the quality of which 50 years ago would have won a Michelin star for a restaurant.”
Boudreaux also reminds, and quite “importantly,” that “you customize your grocery cart to get exactly the mix of items that you want, which differs from the mix chosen by each of the many other shoppers who are in the store with you.”
“To get this mix you need not attend meetings to lobby for your choice or otherwise to seek the approval of anyone else. No institution in modern society outdoes the supermarket at being pro-choice.
“This happy outcome is opposite the dream of ‘democratic socialists’ in which individualized economic choices give way to the collective, one-bundle-fits all outcome chosen by a majority of the voters.”
Here’s Boudreaux’s bottom line (and it should be a conclusion as universal as the sun’s rising and setting each day:
“To identify American grocery shoppers, of all people, as being in special need of a subsidized grocery service is as ludicrous as identifying Gisele Bündchen as a woman in special need of a subsidized dating service.”
Whether in New York City or in Pittsburgh, is this an attempt by “The State” to further control society? Given the paucity of brain matter possessed by those prosecuting such schemes, we sincerely doubt it.
But what we have no doubt about at all is that these recidivist purveyors of government-as- grocer and similar schemes suffer from the worst malady infecting far too many government leaders – ignorance incarnate.
And it will take a cleanup in just about every aisle of government and many aisles in academia to reverse this brainless trend.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
