NYC mayoral candidate proposes the Hugo-Chavez solution to high grocery prices: government markets

 

Among socialists, you can't fix stupid.

A socialist running for mayor of New York City has announced that he has just the thing to stop inflation and high food prices: government groceries, calling them "the public option."

Turns out he's been at this for a few months and still hasn't been laughed out of the race, nor, apparently, run out of money to continue. And since AOC has demonstrated that socialists can actually get elected in New York, it's probably worth paying attention to.

According to a publication which features Ira Stoll as a writer, called The Editors:

A socialist New York State assemblyman who is running for mayor of New York City is pushing a plan to have the City of New York open “a network” of city-government operated grocery stores.

The candidate, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, previewed the plan in a vertical video.

“Grocery prices are out of control. The cost of eggs and milk has skyrocketed. Some stores are even using dynamic pricing, jacking up the cost over the course over the course of a day depending on what they can get away with. It doesn’t need to be this way,” he says.

“I’m Zohran Mamdani, and as mayor, I will create a network of city-owned grocery stores. It’s like a public option for produce. We will redirect city funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores whose mission is lower prices, not price gouging. These stores will operate without a profit motive or having to pay property taxes or rent and will pass on those savings to you. They’ll partner with small businesses and nearby farms and sell at wholesale prices,” he says.

“The job of city government isn’t to tinker around the edges while one in four children across our city go hungry,” he says.

 

That was last December. Stoll reports that he told the dewy-eyed New York Times reporters that his plan was "bold and workable" and they had no questions.

Stoll reports that Chicago had just such a scheme in the works, and last year, San Francisco enacted one, too, a glorified food pantry with the "experience" of shopping in a grocery store, which has some pretty stiff requirements and conditions for anyone being privileged to partake. It apparently is still in operation, for now, but no word on how it's doing.

Other than a massive failure to understand where inflation comes from which is monetary policy, there's just one problem: The idea has been thunk up before -- many times, actually, by past socialist dictators, all of whom turned their nations into socialist hellholes.

Probably the most recent case was in Venezuela, which at the time was drawing praise for its 'compassion' and socialist vision for the poor, from actors such as Sean Penn and other Hollywood idiots. It still was drawing praise as recently as 2013 from the United Nations for "reducing hunger."

In 2003, Venezuela's clown-president, Hugo Chavez, announced the creation of government-owned groceries that unlike private sector ones, would shun the profit motive and deliver groceries to the public at cut-rate subsidized prices.

It was a disaster, leading to shortages, rationing, and corruption on an at-the-time untold scale (this was before DOGE in the states).

Within months, shortages appeared at Mercal.

The great Miguel Octavio, who was an investment banker in Caracas at the time, and wrote an award-winning blog noted the first signs of trouble:

According to today�s Tal Cual newspaper (by subscription only, page 8) the Government�s Mercal project is already suffering from shortages only months after being initiated. Mercal, meant to compete with the private sector by importing foodstuffs at the controlled exchange rates, without paying custom duties and at cheaper prices, is becoming like many other Chavez projects, neglected after being announced with much fanfare. According to Tal Cual, the Government supermarkets suffer from even more severe shortages than those of the private sector. While most critics have focused on the lower quality products of Mercal, I still have nobody explain to me how the Government�s company has prices only 10% below free market prices since it receives foreign currency for imports at the official exchange rate of Bs. 1600 per US$ (versus US$ 2600 in the black market), pays no custom duties and is supposed to be a not-for profit project. To me this clearly demonstrates that this is simply an immense source of corruption and somebody is getting very rich at the expense of the poor of Venezuela.

By March 2007, rationing began, with some hapless indigents having to display their bellies to be stamped with ink by government officials once they got their food to ensured no "hoarding."

Ration cards appeared at PDVAL, another government food supplier linked to the Venezuelan state oil company, by February 2008:

And so it begins. After shortages arising from price controls and the Government’s inefficient intervention into the food distribution chain, the new PDVSA owned PDVAL markets will have what effectively represents the introduction of rationing cards in Venezuela.

One can only ask the obvious: Where or what next?

Asdrubal Chavez, Vice-President of PDVSA and the President’s cousin (of course), announced that in the planned network of large (PDVAL) and smaller markets (PDVALitos) run by the PDVSA subsidiary, they will keep a register of all purchases, limiting purchases to once a day. Moreover, they have done the studies of how much food a family may need and purchases will be limited to those amounts. They will have a “file card” (read rationing card) to register purchases so as to avoid repeats and people exceeding the limits.

There are 26 PDVALs and 20 PDVALitos, but the Government plans to have about 180 and 2,000 of each by the end of the year. The PDVAL network will be separate from the existing Mercal network.

You have to love the creativity of the revolution as they reinvent failed concepts and as they fail, improve on them to emphasize their failed aspects. Ayn Rand would have been so proud of them, as they fit her descriptions so well!

And by 2010, Miguel described how the shortages got hellish.

Corruption was rife -- as described here, with the government unable to find anyone honest to run the stores.

And there was this scandal in the summer of 2010, known as "Pudreval" where container ships full of 130,000 tons of imported food (a contradiction of Chavez's original mission to sell local produce at government-subsidized prices) were left on the docks to rot, nobody getting any food at all.

The same will happen to New York. One just hopes that New Yorkers are smart enough to learn from the Venezuelan experience of it. Perhaps the Venezuelan migrants they're hosting can fill them in.

In the meantime, chalk this up as idiocy on parade in the wretched politics New York.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/03/new_york_mayoral_candidate_proposes_the_hugo_chavez_solution_to_high_grocery_prices_government_markets.html