Poison With A Smile

Always-smiling NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently boasted that his city run supermarkets will offer select items at 30% below market price. I am sure his fanbois are cheering and chest-thumping and leg-tingly about ‘sticking it to the greedy’ who overcharge for basic groceries.

Many of them are, of course, wallowing in ignorance.

Simple fact: the average operating margin (i.e. profit) of supermarkets is 2.5%.

So, Mamdani-marts will sell those select items at a steep loss.

But, wait...

Mamdani has also promised to pay above-market wages and benefits to employees at those markets. Whereas we might assume, based on the two figures I posted, that those markets would lose 27.5% on those items, once above-market operating costs are folded in, the loss will be even greater.

The shortfall will be covered from the city’s coffers. Coffers filled by taxes. Taxes imposed most heavily on the “rich.” While Mamdani-bois want us to believe that he’s simply going to take a few more bucks from some billionaires, that’s not what’s actually going to happen.

First - it’s going to take taxing a lot more than the 125 or so billionaires that live in NYC to cover Mamdani’s spending dreams.

Second - whenever a billionaire leaves, the city taxes (income, capital gains, property, etc) he or she currently pays dwindle to zero. Many places in the US and around the world have had to rethink their taxes on the rich, because they ended actually losing revenue after their higher rates chased wealthy people away.

Third - and this is classic shallow thinking by socialist do-gooders - people respond to incentives. I guarantee you that enterprising bodega owners will clear the Mamdani-marts out of those discounted items, and resell them at market rates in their own businesses. This already happens at the warehouse stores like Costco, and it also happens whenever a disruption like a hurricane causes shortages.

The only remedy to the bodega-arbitrageur reality is quotas, and even then, the quotas will only do so much to limit that behavior. So, at least some of those heavily discounted and subsidized groceries will end up being sold at market prices anyway, with whoever wishes to invest the time it takes to buy them up benefiting from the wealth transfer that the city seeks to engage. The target consumers - the working poor - will either have to compete in the mornings with the bodega owners or face empty shelves.

This is always the way when government interferes with the functioning of markets. Distortions beget distortions.

Products can be two of three things: cheap, good, available. Force one variable, one of the other two will naturally compensate.

But, really, this isn’t about helping the less well off.

To know who a person is, watch what he does. Mamdani’s fixation is on hurting the rich far more than helping the poor. His gloating over the recent pied-a-terre tax - and his publishing of the names of all those rich people who will pay it, reveal his true nature. Behind that omnipresent smile is a hate-filled snake of a man, more interested in crushing the people he considers enemies than in doing good.

I imagine that, in his mind, crushing the successful (and the Jews, it must be mentioned) counts as doing good. Unfortunately for us, societies do not prosper by harming their most productive members. Zero-sum thinking, which is at the core of this “democratic socialism” that is all the rage among a certain subset of our populace, actually produces negative-sum results. Europe’s social democracies, which overlay massive welfare and regulatory states on nominally capitalistic economies, “enjoy” stagnation. The way of the Mamdanis is more destructive, and rather than simply stagnate an economy, would actually shrink it. Everyone becomes poorer. Except for the political parasite class, of course - it’s easy to prosper when you have a monopoly on force and are few in number.

Sellers of snake oil usually pitch their poison with a smile. Mamdani is no different. New York City’s residents - the ones who voted for this destroyer - deserve what they get. The sad part is that so many who did not vote for him are getting it as well. The even sadder part is that Mamdani will likely win a second term, because people in this town would rather chew hot asphalt than abandon their tribe. Seven and a half more years of this evil will take decades to repair.