Abundance, The Details

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, in contrast, has defined a version of abundance that serves working-class Americans. He has found a framing that has resonance far beyond New York City: The cost of living is killing ordinary people.

What goes into the cost of living? Housing costs, child care, food, higher education, transportation. Mamdani’s program addresses these directly. Addressing the scarcity of affordable housing will require everything from new construction to rent control and other forms of regulation, of which zoning reform can be part, but only a part.

Klein has scoffed at Mamdani’s idea of publicly owned supermarkets in food deserts, pointing out that supermarket chains operate on very low margins. But Klein misses the fact that Mamdani is proposing grocery pilots in places where the chains don’t find it profitable to operate at all. Several small towns in red-state America that have lost chain stores already have municipally owned food markets.

Klein also misses the fact that high retail food prices are substantially the result not of excessive markups by chains, but extreme consolidation and price-gouging by producers, for which the remedy is antitrust. In addition, if smaller stores could get the same pricing from food wholesalers as the big-box chains—something that is required by law under the Robinson-Patman Act—they could compete in these food deserts. A city-owned grocery in New York would have the resources to bring Robinson-Patman cases and create a level playing field.

By contrast, consider Mamdani’s now-famous video in which he interviews several New York halal street vendors. He learns that they charge about $10 for a plate of chicken or lamb and rice, and that a big part of their cost is not food but the money they have to pay fixers to get their permit to operate, averaging about $20,000. The city charges only $400. Why not get the permit directly from the city? Because there is an interminable waiting list. A bill providing more permits, effectively putting fixers out of business, never gets passed. If it did pass, a reform that Mamdani supports, the cost of a plate of halal food would drop to $7 or $8.

So there, vividly, is an easy-to-grasp lesson in unresponsive or corrupt government, and the impact on ordinary people, both vendors and consumers. It’s typical municipal corruption and sloth. Citizens can provide other examples, from the hassles at the DMV to getting sundry permits to the tricks and traps in contracts. It’s Klein for regular people.