Here's An Idea To Get 30% Cheaper Groceries In New York Without Taxpayer Subsidies: Allow Walmart!

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Here's An Idea To Get 30% Cheaper Groceries In New York Without Taxpayer Subsidies: Allow Walmart!

  • During his campaign for office last fall, our new Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised to make groceries “affordable” for New Yorkers; but he provided few specifics.

  • Some specifics then emerged in late July, when Mamdani issued a big press release on his proposed public grocery store project. We learned that there are plans for five municipally-owned stores — one in each borough of the City — and that the groceries these stores will sell, or at least a “core basket” of them, will be “30% cheaper.” We know that the groceries will be “30% cheaper” because the Mayor’s press release says so multiple times:

  • Today [July 28], Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani, Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su and New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) announced that a core basket of everyday groceries will be 30 percent cheaper at the five new municipal grocery stores. . . . “A trip to the grocery store shouldn’t spell dread for New Yorkers [said Mayor Mamdani]. That’s why we are guaranteeing a 30% discount on the most common and most critical groceries. . . .” ‍ ‍

  • Well OK, 30% cheaper than what?

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For The Left, Nothing Succeeds Like Failure

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  • A couple of weeks ago, law professor Jonathan Turley devoted one of his columns to this seeming anomaly — that the Left somehow gains from its own failures. The headline of his column was “The worse it gets, the better it is: American leftism is thriving on its own failures.”‍ ‍

  • The theme of the piece is that the failure of a policy of the Left is never admitted to be a failure, but rather is only seen as a reason that the taxpayers haven’t yet devoted sufficient resources to the issue, and therefore the answer is to double down and spend yet more money on the failed policy. Turley provides several examples of the phenomenon, in the areas of immigration, health care, public education and housing.

  • My reaction is, I’m glad that someone besides myself is finally noticing. However, Turley has barely scratched the surface, and indeed omits to mention some of the very biggest examples.

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The Brain's Concept Of The World Versus The Real World

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The real world — It’s full of complexities, ambiguities, unknowns, trade-offs, risks, and evils that we would prefer not to acknowledge. Perfection can be sought and approached, but nothing close to perfection can be achieved.

And then there’s the world that we can imagine in our minds. In that world, we can ignore the complexities and ambiguities and the rest. Achieving perfection can be imagined as just a matter of overcoming a few simple obstacles. I often write about the musings of people who conjure in their minds imaginary scenarios of perfection that are inconsistent with anything that can be achieved in the real world. The most important example is a socialist economic system of perfect justice and fairness. Another example is an energy system that produces always-available electricity in infinite amounts from the intermittent wind and sun.

Consider now another example: the crime found in fiction versus the crime found in the real world.

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The Democratic Socialists Of America And Dolly Parton

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The Democratic Socialists Of America And Dolly Parton

The sad news today is that country music legend Dolly Parton has died.

I admit that I’m not particularly a fan of country music. It’s not that I don’t like it; I just devote my time to other things. But everybody knew about Dolly Parton, and as far as I can tell there isn’t anyone who did not like and admire her. Mary Katherine Ham summarizes the reaction in a tweet this afternoon:

A year of mourning for one of the only people we all agreed on. So sad. What a lady and what a life.

Parton lived a life of hard work and of gratitude. She worked her way up from nothing.

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How Serious Is The Case For "Corruption" Against President Trump?

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A major theme of President Trump’s critics is that he is corrupt. As a couple of examples, here is Elizabeth Warren on July 26 calling Trump “the most corrupt president of the United States any time in American history”; and here is a piece from the Guardian on August 11 calling Trump’s second term “the most openly corrupt” presidency ever. There are hundreds more where those came from.

But is there anything to this? As long time readers here are aware, my view is that politics is inherently corrupt. In this way, politics differs from business, because in business it is completely legitimate to seek to maximize one’s own profit. By contrast, in politics, the officeholder has a duty to exercise policy in the public good, and not for his own benefit or for the benefit of his friends and supporters.

But government policy affects everybody, and it is inevitable that some policies will benefit the officeholder and his friends, or will disadvantage the officeholder’s adversaries. Did the officeholder implement some particular policies entirely for the public good, or in whole or part to enrich himself and his friends? It is impossible to know. And in the real world, every political officeholder will implement policies that can be justified as being in the public good, but in reality also benefit the officeholder himself, or his friends and supporters, disproportionately. Is it corrupt? How would you know?

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Democratic Socialists Commemorate Fidel Castro's 100th Birthday

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As you may have seen, August 13, 2026 would have been the 100th birthday of Fidel Castro. Fidel had retired as Dictator of Cuba all the way back in 2006 at age 80, and then died ten years ago in 2016.

Commemorations of people who have been dead for ten years should be reserved for those who did something worthwhile in their lives. In Fidel’s case, during his more than half-century of absolute rule over Cuba, he brought poverty and ruin to the island’s economy and people. Yet somehow he remains a hero to the Left.

If you don’t believe me, check out this post from the website of the Democratic Socialists of America on August 13. You would think it must be a parody, but the url is dsausa.org, and the site has tabs for all the other DSA claptrap.

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