Zohran Mamdani is running for Mayor of New York City to “lower the cost of living for working class New Yorkers,” according to his campaign website.

He has promised to freeze the cost of rent “stabilized” apartments, put the “worst landlords” out of business, create faster and fare “free” bus service, provide “no cost” childcare, increase the city’s minimum wage to $30 per hour, and build 200,000 units of “affordable” housing.

His most disruptive policy proposal, however, is to get the city into the grocery store business:

“As Mayor, Zohran will create a network of city-owned grocery stores focused on keeping prices low, not making a profit. Without having to pay rent or property taxes, they will reduce overhead and pass on savings to shoppers. They will buy and sell at wholesale prices, centralize warehousing and distribution, and partner with local neighborhoods on products and sourcing.”

This is grocery store-communism, and it is a terrible idea. Like all communism, it claims the intention and the capability to uplift working people. And to be sure, working people have been stomped into the dirt throughout our nation. The problem, however, is that it is the state’s boots that have done the stomping, and no amount of government intervention can make things better.

In the popular mind, prices are a tool the evil capitalists use to highway rob people. In reality, as economist Murray Rothbard observed:

“Price, on the free market, performs a necessary rationing function, in which the available pounds or bushels or other units of a good are allocated freely and voluntarily to those who are most willing to purchase the product.”