The bill for ‘free stuff’ always arrives. Just ask the generation that believed Mamdani

Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the United States spent billions and billions of dollars to prevent communism from spreading throughout the world. Why would we write off New York City and abdicate to this dangerous ideology now? We were told that this thinking was rejected and left upon the ash heap of history, for good reason.In 1928, Moscow opened Gorky Park, the flagship of the Soviet “parks of culture,” a state-curated pleasure garden built to give citizens the feeling of abundance and leisure without the substance of a functioning economy behind it.Karl Marx called religion the opium of the people, a painkiller that dulls suffering without curing its cause. A century later, it is socialism itself that plays that role for a new generation, not because it promises a good afterlife, but because it delivers a good feeling now, one that tends to wear off right around the time the bill arrives. Mayor Zohran Mamdani won broad support among young New Yorkers by promising a break from the grinding math of rent and groceries that has defined their adult lives, including a pledge to open five city-run grocery stores selling staples 30% below market price. It was a hopeful message. It is not a financing plan.Supermarkets operate on razor-thin profit margins, typically 1% to 4% of sales. That is the central problem with the mayor’s proposal: You cannot manufacture a 30% discount out of a business that barely breaks even. New York has committed $70 million to the construction of the five stores, with independent estimates putting annual operating costs well into eight figures, a recurring expense layered onto a city already facing a multibillion-dollar budget deficit. The 30% savings are an illusion — someone has to cover the gap, and City Hall has been candid that it’ll be the taxpayer.The damage does not stop at the ledger. New York has roughly 13,000 bodegas, most operating on similarly thin margins. A government-backed competitor that pays no rent and no property taxes and sells at a mandated discount is not a level playing field — it is a taxpayer-financed rival that no private grocer can match. If those neighborhood stores close in response, the food deserts the plan claims to solve could worsen rather than improve.This tension is not confined to one city. On Sept. 1, the House of Representatives passed a resolution denouncing socialism and the Democratic Socialists of America by name, 220-192. Eight House Democrats crossed the aisle to support it, a signal that the party’s own establishment wing is increasingly willing to break publicly with its insurgent socialist flank over exactly this kind of unfunded promise.Meanwhile, the macroeconomic backdrop makes municipal experiments like this harder to sustain, not easier. Treasury yields have been sensitive to inflation, and when the federal benchmark rises, New York’s own borrowing costs rise with it. A city already running a multibillion-dollar deficit and now proposing to finance new subsidized enterprises will find that math considerably less forgiving in a higher-rate environment.None of this makes the underlying frustration illegitimate.The affordability crisis driving support for proposals such as this one is real, and the young voters drawn to it are not wrong to want relief. But relief that is not actually paid for does not disappear — it is simply deferred and redistributed, typically to the same people who were promised it in the first place.NEW YORK IS TURNING INTO BRITAIN, AND THAT SHOULD TERRIFY AMERICANSSo, millennials: If you want free groceries, it’s back to ramen noodles. Someone has to cover the difference between what these stores charge and what it costs to run them, and it won’t be the mayor’s office reaching into its own pocket. It’ll be you, the same generation promised relief, discovering that the checkout line and the tax bill are, in the end, the same line.The bill for “free stuff” always arrives. It just takes the scenic route. Expect a radical upcharge to prop up the apparatchiks.Caroline Shinkle, the Republican nominee for New York’s 12th Congressional District, is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in economics and Harvard Law School. She previously worked at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington and spent time at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany; the Bank of Israel in Jerusalem; and the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland.