New York City does not need to run a chain of grocery stores

Mamdani's proposal seems to go against the basics of capitalism

- MATTHEW YGLESIAS

Zohran Mamdani brings a lot of guts, charisma and hustle to his campaign for New York City mayor, along with a laudable desire to offer the public a break with a dysfunctional status quo. Unfortunately, the break he's offering largely consists of bad ideas.

On that list, the idea of government-run grocery stores isn't the most pernicious, but it is the most grimly fascinating, in part because nobody seems to be asking for it. The demand to "freeze the rent" on the slightly less than half of the city's rental stock that is subject to rent stabilization rules is misguided for lots of Economics 101 reasons. But it's also true that, for many of those same reasons, it will serve the short-term interests of rent-stabilized tenants. I think it's a bad idea and regrettable that so many New York voters seem excited by it. But I do understand what they're thinking.

The popularity of city-run supermarkets, by contrast, is kind of mystifying. The idea keeps popping up on the left, though nobody demands it and nobody can decide what problem it's supposed to solve. When this proposal came up in Chicago, it was supposed to tackle 'food deserts.' The idea was that some neighborhoods, especially on Chicago's poor and depopulating South Side, were suffering because residents lacked easy access to a grocery store.