The Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City, Zohran Mamdani, has commanded a share of the nation’s attention that few candidates for local office will ever achieve. Many of the controversies swirling around him have at least centered on issues that always inspire heated debate, like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Since his victory in the primary, though, a surprising number of denunciations of Mamdani by conservatives and libertarians have centered around … grocery stores.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, John Catsimatidis (who owns the grocery store chains Gristedes and D’Agostino’s) warned that Mamdani’s policies on grocery sales amount to “radical socialism” and, if implemented, “would collapse our food supply, kill private industry, and drag us down a path toward the bread lines of the old Soviet Union.” The same analogy was pursued by Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. “Forget the old-school communist talk about socializing the means of production,” McCardle wrote. “Mamdani wants to socialize the means of consumption.”
A surprising number of denunciations of Mamdani by conservatives and libertarians have centered around … grocery stores.
Judging by these reactions, you’d think that Mamdani had, at the very least, proposed expropriating every privately owned supermarket and bodega in the city and placing them under control of a People’s Commissariat of Food Supply. You might even wonder if he’d gone further and proposed sending the NYPD to conquer some rural areas of upstate New York and forcibly collectivize agriculture there.
In reality, he’s proposed a very modest experiment. He doesn’t want to touch a single privately owned store. Instead, he wants to start five new city-owned grocery stores, one in each of the five boroughs, designed to provide a public option for grocery shopping in the areas within those boroughs with the fewest private options (where grocery prices at those few stores that do operate tend to be very high).
If this sounds like an extreme proposal, it shouldn’t. There are 17 states around the country with public monopolies on liquor stores. One of these is the most otherwise libertarian state in the union, New Hampshire, whose state motto is “Live Free or Die.” If the 80 state-owned liquor stores in New Hampshire don’t inspire hysterical analogies to the Soviet Union, despite the lack of private competitors, introducing a grand total of five private groceries to New York City (whose population is almost eight times the total population of New Hampshire) shouldn’t either.
Billy Binion, a writer for the libertarian magazine Reason, argues that this is an analogy that should make us more skeptical of the idea, rather than less. After the end of Prohibition, he points out, some politicians in these states supported moving state monopolies on liquor stores because they “wanted drinking to be difficult and expensive after alcohol was legalized again.” As such, the analogy to food sales “isn’t exactly reassuring.”
But there’s a world of difference between why some prohibitionist dead-enders might have supported a policy in the 1930s and why it remains popular in the 2020s.
The difference between prevailing attitudes in different states also matters. Are we really supposed to believe that voters and politicians in “Live Free or Die” New Hampshire continue to support the state monopoly because they wish Prohibition would come back and, failing that, they want a nanny state to do everything it can to discourage drinking?
If so, the policy has been a truly spectacular failure. States are clustered together closely in that part of the country, and people from around the region often drive to New Hampshire for the sole purpose of stocking up on cheap liquor at the state liquor stores. Anyone who’s ever driven into the state will remember the giant billboards directing people to those stores. In fact, NPR reported several years ago that latter-day bootleggers are sometimes caught buying up hundreds of bottles of cheap New Hampshire liquor to resell in other states. Far from being a hotbed of neo-prohibitionism, New Hampshire keeps its liquor store policy in place precisely because it brings much-needed revenue to a state that’s notoriously reluctant to raise funds through taxation.
It’s a quirk of culture and history that publicly owned liquor stores are so much more common in capitalist countries than publicly owned stores selling milk and eggs, but on a basic logistical level, a city-owned grocery store in Queens would be much more like a state-owned liquor store in New Hampshire than it would be like a Soviet grocery store. Aside from John Catsimatidis and Megan McCardle, I’ve never heard anyone suggest that the reason shelves were so often empty at Soviet stores was because the stores themselves didn’t know how to order needed goods from suppliers or stock the shelves, rather than the problems with making sure the actual production of goods was coordinated with fine-grained consumer preferences in a system where every aspect of the economy was centrally planned.
Perhaps, given the smaller profit margins in stores selling perishable groceries than stores selling beer, wine and hard liquor, though, Mamdani’s proposed experiment with a tiny number of municipal grocery stores would be a failure and it would have to be abandoned. There’s no way to be certain before it’s tried.
New Hampshire keeps its liquor store policy because it brings much-needed revenue to a state that’s notoriously reluctant to raise funds through taxation.
What I can’t get over, though, is the massive contradiction at the heart of the right-wing panic about his proposal. If the shelves would be empty since no public employee could ever navigate the delicate logistical hurdles, why on earth would anyone shop there rather than finding a private alternative? But if so, how are we supposed to understand the claim in the Wall Street Journal op-ed that Mamdani wants to “replace” private with public grocery stores? Is the problem that any city-owned grocery stores would be horrendously inefficient, such that we’d see empty shelves a la Leningrad in 1970? Or is it that they’ll be so wildly successful that the initial experiment with five stores will mushroom and all private competitors will eventually be put out of business?
Neither criticism is especially compelling on its own. But if critics want to make any sense at all, they have to pick.