Comrade Zohran Kwame Mamdani has been mayor of New York City for nearly eight weeks now, and he has not yet delivered on any of his lofty promises; instead, all New Yorkers have gotten out of his tenure so far is a lot of garbage in the streets. The cryptocurrency outfit Polymarket even beat the boy mayor to the punch on one of his campaign promises, opening up what it billed as “New York’s First Free Grocery Store.” The store was privately funded, not city-run, and only operated for five days, but that was plenty of time to demonstrate yet again that socialism, like Mamdani itself, doesn’t deliver on its promises, and only leaves people angry and disappointed.
Enthusiasm was initially high. Fox News reported Thursday that “in a busy stretch of restaurants and boutiques in the West Village, hundreds of New Yorkers queued up outside a pop-up shop offering free groceries.”
The people in the long queue, however, for the most part went away disappointed. New York’s First Free Grocery Store hit the wall of reality quite early in the day. One woman recounted: “I literally got here at 9:00 … and basically what they said is that they ran out of tickets.” The tickets were necessary to gain entry into the store, and just as grocery store shelves were so often empty in the old Soviet Union, New York’s First Free Grocery Store quickly ran out of tickets.
One man commented bitterly: “They told me that they ran out of tickets. I couldn’t get no more food.… I couldn’t get access to the store.” A security guard, clearly already weary with the charade only an hour after it started, shouted just after 9 a.m.: “Let’s go people, let’s go. Go home. Do not linger, do not look, do not watch. Please go home.”
It was a scene that could have unfolded in Moscow in 1980 or Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. Aside from the gulags, the line is the most distinguishing feature of socialist life. Even the New York Times wrote about it in 1985: “So common and pervasive are the lines that they have evolved their own etiquette, even their own slang. Shoppers in a busy store can have their place held in one line while they stand in another. Women with small children pass freely to the front. Other privileged people, ranging from disabled war veterans to recipients of the title ‘Hero of Socialist Labor,’ are also allowed to go to the head of the line. Goods, in this world, are ‘handed out,’ not sold, as if to underline that the issue is not one of cost or choice, but simply one of finding the stuff.”
One principal reason why this is so is that socialism, by confiscating the worker’s wealth and making it useless for him to try to work harder to get ahead, removes all incentive to do anything more than the minimum that will keep him out of the gulag. A grocer in a capitalist society can get rich by providing cheap and plentiful foodstuffs for the masses. In a socialist society, the groceries are even cheaper: they’re free. But there is no incentive for the worker to ensure their supply, as there is no reward for him in doing so. And so in the land where groceries are free, going without basic foodstuffs becomes a fact of life.
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