Glenn Beck just laid it bare, and every American who still believes in free enterprise should pay attention.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist darling of the DSA, isn’t building grocery stores. He is a radical Marxist Democrat, member of the DSA who plans on destroying all freedom in the U.S. He’s building a taxpayer-funded wrecking ball aimed straight at private business. The plan: spend at least $70 million of other people’s money to open five government-run grocery stores — one in each borough — that will deliberately sell core staples at 30% below market prices. These stores won’t pay rent. They won’t pay property taxes. And they won’t care if they lose money hand over fist. They can do this with many industries under the banner of their fake Socialism designed to destroy all business and make as many people as poor as possible, so they scream for Marxism
Beck’s math is brutal and correct. The average American grocery store operates on razor-thin margins of about 1–2 cents of profit on the dollar. Mamdani’s city stores are projected to lose roughly 28 cents on every single dollar they ring up. How do you compete with that if you’re a family-owned bodega or independent grocer who actually has to make payroll, pay rent, and turn a profit to survive?
You don’t.
A key Mamdani ally said the quiet part out loud when asked about the bodega owners who will be wiped out: “If one publicly owned grocery store is bringing prices down enough to put a man out of business, then maybe he shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place.”
That’s not compassion. That’s the pure ideology of Democratic Socialism — the American rebrand of the same Marxist impulse that has produced empty shelves, rationing, and black markets everywhere it’s been tried. The government doesn’t need to nationalize the entire industry overnight. It just needs to subsidize its own competitors until the private ones go bankrupt. Then the state becomes the only game in town.
This is textbook economic destruction dressed up as “affordability.” New Yorkers already face some of the highest grocery prices in the country. Instead of cutting the taxes, regulations, and crime that drive those costs, Mamdani and his fellow travelers in the Democratic Socialists of America prefer the command-economy solution: create state-backed stores that can lose money indefinitely because the losses are socialized onto every taxpayer in the city.
We’ve seen this movie before. Kansas City poured nearly $18 million into a publicly backed grocery store that still lost nearly $900,000 in a single year, suffered empty shelves, rampant theft, and eventually closed. Communist China and the old Soviet system ran the same “people’s stores.” The result was always the same: shortages, ration tickets, and long lines while the political class ate well. Venezuela tried it too. The shelves went bare and the people starved.
Mamdani’s version comes with better branding and a 30% discount promise on produce, meat, seafood, dairy, and bread. Private operators will supposedly run the stores under city price controls. The first locations are planned for the South Bronx and East Harlem, with openings targeted for 2027. But the core principle remains unchanged: the state will compete against its own citizens using money forcibly taken from those same citizens, and it will keep competing until the private sector is driven out.
This is not “helping working families.” This is the systematic replacement of voluntary exchange with political control over the food supply. Once the bodegas and independent markets are gone, New Yorkers will be left with whatever the city bureaucracy decides to stock, at whatever quality it decides is good enough, funded by whatever new taxes or deficits the politicians demand next.
Whatfinger News and MAGA readers understand the pattern. The same people who spent years calling capitalism the enemy are now using the power of government to prove that private business cannot survive when forced to compete against a rival that never has to balance its books. The goal is not cheaper groceries long-term. The goal is dependency and control.
Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists are not hiding their ideology. They are simply testing how much of it they can impose on the largest city in America before the rest of the country notices. The bodega owners getting crushed are the canaries in the coal mine. If this model succeeds in New York, every blue city will try the same playbook.
Free markets built the most abundant food supply in human history. Government-run stores have a perfect record of producing the opposite. New York is about to run the experiment again — with your money on the line and the small business owners of the city as the first casualties. Never forget, the Democrats are openly saying they will do this nationwide. These people are just plain evil, and must be stopped. Unfortunately, with voting laws the way they are in Marxist controlled states and cities like NYC, it is impossible to defeat them at the ballot box. They can always mail in, find or invent as many votes as they need. Which means, a Marxist Confederacy of cities and states is now forming in the U.S. backed by voter fraud and your tax dollars. Only Federal action can stop it, or a real revolution.
The Best “Go Paid” Deal on Substack! You Get REAL Stuff!!
Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the https://artofliberty.org/store/.
Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many OR “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.
Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History... Exposed! + Liberator flash drive + a signed high-resolution hardcover of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many + everything else in our “Everything Bundle” of the best in voluntaryist thought delivered domestically. International pays shipping. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne at an event.
