Mamdani is a socialist. Many wonder how he got elected.
And now Zohran Mamdani just spat on the grave of a key Republican with one moronic statement.
A Socialist Mayor Who Knows His Reagan, Even If He Doesn’t Follow Him
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is not shy about who he is. He campaigned as a democratic socialist, governed as one, and delivered his inaugural address without a single word of apology for what he believes. On Monday, he took that self-assurance to a Bronx announcement event and made perhaps his most ideologically revealing move yet: he quoted Ronald Reagan — and then explained, at some length, why Reagan was wrong.
“Standing here this morning, I cannot help but think of the words of our fortieth president, Ronald Reagan. He famously said the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help,'” Mamdani told the crowd at the announcement of the second of his promised five city-owned grocery stores, to be located at the Peninsula development in Hunts Point in the Bronx.
“It’s a good quote, but I disagree,” he continued. “I think nine more terrifying words are actually, ‘I worked all day and can’t feed my family.'”
It was a genuinely sharp rhetorical construction. Whatever one thinks of Mamdani’s policy vision, he has a gift for clear, accessible messaging that speaks directly to the people he is trying to reach — and an honest accounting of the food access problem in the South Bronx is not wrong on the merits. By the mayor’s own figures, 77% of households in the neighborhoods surrounding the Hunts Point site cannot afford basic needs on their current incomes. That is a real problem.
The proposed solution, however, is where conservatives and free-market analysts part ways sharply.
A $70 Million Experiment With A Familiar Historical Precedent
Mamdani has allocated $70 million to develop a city-owned grocery store in each borough. The Bronx location, a 20,000-square-foot store at the Peninsula development, is expected to open in 2027. The previously announced East Harlem location at La Marqueta will follow. Property owners in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island are being invited to submit their storefronts through an online portal to be considered as sites.
From a conservative perspective, the structural problems with this plan begin with the economics. The Harlem facility alone is reportedly set to cost taxpayers well above market value to build and could consume more than $300,000 a year in perpetual operating expenses. Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet framed the concern bluntly, arguing that Mamdani had “flipped Ronald Reagan’s warning upside down” and that “his answer is government-run grocery stores that will use taxpayer advantages to undercut private competition.”
That last point deserves more attention than it has received. Government-subsidized grocery stores competing against privately owned food retailers don’t reduce overall food costs in a community — they potentially cannibalize the businesses that are already there, eliminating jobs and private investment in the process. The result, at best, is a marginally cheaper government store funded by taxpayers whose other cost-of-living burdens the store does nothing to address.
The historical precedent Mamdani himself cited should give pause. La Guardia’s La Marqueta — the 1930s East Harlem municipal market he invoked as inspiration — functioned effectively as a public farmers market for decades before seeing rapid decline in the 1970s as New York City careened toward bankruptcy and crime skyrocketed. It wasn’t a failure because of bad intentions. It was a failure because government-run markets are hostage to the same fiscal pressures, political priorities, and bureaucratic inefficiencies that plague every other government program.
The Bigger Question For New York — And For The Country
Mamdani is serious, intelligent, and genuinely motivated by the affordability crisis hammering working-class New Yorkers. His description of the problem lands. “When government understands its purpose as serving the very working people that it has left behind time and again, it can make a difference in the most pressing struggles facing our city today,” he said Monday. “It’s not just that government can help, it’s that government must help, and our government will help.”
The conviction is real. The track record of cities attempting to replicate private markets through public ownership is considerably less encouraging. New York’s fiscal history is, in many respects, a chronicle of ambitious government programs that delivered real benefits in the short term and became structural budget liabilities in the long term. Mamdani’s grocery stores are a small piece of that story so far — but they represent a philosophy that, applied at scale across the city’s economy, carries the seeds of exactly the dysfunction that Reagan was describing in 1986.
Reagan’s nine words were born from the wreckage of Great Society programs that promised to solve poverty and produced instead permanent dependency, ballooning bureaucracies, and cities like New York nearly going bankrupt by 1975. Mamdani’s rebuttal — that working poverty is the real terror — is fair enough as a rhetorical point. Whether government-run grocery stores are the right medicine for it is a question the history of that same city should compel him to answer more carefully.
