By Tom Wilson
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has stated plans for five city-owned grocery stores to compete with private stores in NYC. However, as Henry Hazlitt and Frederic Bastiat before him have pointed out, the unseen costs in an initiative like this will outweigh the “seen” benefits.
There will be lines, looting, shortages, or limited selection of goods.
Probably all four.
It's like when people in high school would find a way to sneakily divide by zero and then show you that 1=0
Not "unseen" Mises Institute!! We see it, they see it, everyone sees it.
It's the large-scale equivalent of shooting up your neighborhood to drive down the value of property so you can afford it. Or breaking up a marriage so you can trigger them to sell their house at a loss. They know what they're doing, Mises Institute. They're trying to steal the country's territory.
"Unseen" does not mean unintended. It refers to the effects that you can only understand by thinking about the counterfactual case.
I believe we're ready as a country to incorporate the counterfactual into our immediate conscious awareness. Mises Institute is converting 32 to 3*3 to remind readers that the answer is not five. That's all well and good as middle school educational material, but I find it inappropriate to give Mamdani's NAP violations the dignity of adult debate.
New York is an iconic American city. It's the setting of The Fountainhead. We fought the British over New York in our founding. It's time to physically take it back because the longer we wait the more funding they're harvesting from it. Fortunately I expect we'll be receiving formal guidance shortly.