Consumer Watchdog Slams Mamdani’s Grocery Store Madness in New Report

For Immediate Release

Contact: Kara Zupkus (224) 456-0257

WASHINGTON, D.C. – As New Yorkers prepare to head to the polls to elect a new mayor, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) is documenting the economic incoherence and real-world failures of government-run grocery stores. In a new report, TPA assesses a signature proposal of New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. As the report notes, the Mamdani campaign has misrepresented the state of food availability in the city. Further, when tried in other American cities, the policies he proposes have ended in failure.

This report is the first in a series that will examine cases in which government has attempted to enter into the market and provide good and services. Future installments will cover issues related to transportation, energy, broadband, and other topics.

TPA Research Director David McGarry offered the following comment:

“Zohran Mamdani styles himself the scion of a new generation. Yet, his economic ideas are old and worn out, not to mention their unparallelled record of failure. The supposed ‘man of the future’ champions the economic ideas of a century ago. Meanwhile, the intervening years have revealed socialism’s impracticability. The only places socialism has not failed are in the books of socialist intellectuals.

“Time and time again, government programs like those Mamdani proposes trip, stagger, and finally collapse, often at great cost to the taxpayers. Public action simply cannot compete with private action. Economic theory predicts that socialistic endeavors will underperform the private sector. Experience has vindicated theory.

“Mamdani begins with the bad premise that New Yorkers struggle to get to grocery stores, which, as the TPA report documents, is false. Then, ignoring public-policy failures, such as burdensome tax and regulatory policy, he leaps to the conclusion of socialized grocery stores. Such a conclusion ignores the failures of government-run grocery stores in Kansas, Florida, and Missouri, which could not maintain profitability despite heavy subsidization.

“Government-run grocery stores, broadband networks, and other enterprises are neither sufficiently flexible to adjust to changing conditions nor subject to the rigid discipline of profit and loss. American policymakers would do well to remember exactly why socialism and its cousins are not just incoherent theoretically but doomed to failure in practice.”

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The Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to educating the public through the research, analysis and dissemination of information on the government’s effects on the economy.