Zohran Mamdani is launching five government-run grocery stores in NYC with 30% discounts on essentials funded by $70 million of taxpayer money. Sounds wonderful. Cheap food for areas that need it. Who could object?Anyone who understands the economics, history and game theory. Here’s why kind-sounding ideas can be dangerous ideas: 1. It’s a marketing campaign, not a food policy. Five stores won’t feed a city of 8.5 million. They exist to produce a spectacle - a photo of Mamdani holding a loaf of cheap bread and a grin that says “see socialism works.” The stores are the ad but the the product he’s selling is collectivism and more state control… which doesn’t work. 2. The maths is predatory. Grocers run on 1–3% margins. Mamdani is discounting 30% … over ten times the entire profit margin of potential competitors. Tax payers fund rent, property tax and supply and offer no penalty for a business that’s losing money. That kills any hope of competition that would naturally transform demand and supply dynamics for real. 3. It corrupts price signals and creates an arbitrage economy. Prices are data. They tell farmers what to grow, distributors what to ship, entrepreneurs where to invest. Subsidise the price and you corrupt the data ... and create a guaranteed profit for anyone with a shopping trolley. People will stockpile non-perishables, clear the shelves, and resell at market price, pocketing the taxpayer subsidy as personal margin. Venezuela ran this exact experiment: price-controlled stores bred a professional class of resellers, and the subsidised goods ended up on the black market anyway. The discount doesn’t reach the needy. It reaches the fastest to grab and resell the stock. 4. It’s proven to fail at scale. Kansas City tried a municipal grocery store and it burned through millions and ended in empty shelves. The Soviet Union tried it with an entire nation. In 1989, Boris Yeltsin visited an ordinary supermarket in Texas and was so staggered by the abundance available to regular working people that he later admitted it shattered his faith in the Soviet system. A random capitalist grocery store did more to end communism than any weapon ever built. The well sticked grocery-store is a miracle of capitalism not state control. 5. There’s no feedback loop. When a private store fails, it closes. When a government store fails, it gets a bigger budget. A failure becomes the argument for more funding. Losses don’t kill a failed experiment in a state run program… They feed bigger budgets. Watch and be prepared to see the $70m budget become $100m in no time. And the punchline: New York just published a tender asking private operators to actually run these stores. Even the socialist experiment needs capitalists to work the tills. The actual profits will go to government contractors- watch as Accenture suddenly becomes a leading grocery story Labour hire company. Markets aren’t the enemy of ordinary people. They’re the greatest anti-poverty machine ever discovered. Break the machine and everyone eats worse - especially the people you promised to help. The only problem is that by the time it proves to be anothet failed socialist initiative there will have been millions of Tik Tok views of Mamdani pretending it works and spreading socialist propaganda to young people who are weaponised against their own interests.