Groceries Illustrate That Communists Can’t Do Math

We have affordable bananas in America today because capitalists and free marketers can do math and have refined their grocery math for centuries.

Luis Gonzalez | August 7, 2026

The grocery store may be the least forgiving classroom in which to teach political economy. The shelves do not care about ideology. The checkout scanner does not respond to applause lines. A gallon of milk does not know whether it was purchased in a capitalist marketplace or a municipal experiment in economic justice. It only knows what it cost to produce, transport, refrigerate, stock, and sell.

That is the inconvenient thing about economics. The numbers have no political affiliation. They simply arrive at the register.

That reality is the great problem for economic promises. They sound wonderful from a podium. They become considerably more complicated somewhere between the warehouse and the shopping cart.

More than a century ago, Americans laughed at a song built around an apparently contradictory declaration: “Yes, we have no bananas.” The joke worked because the contradiction was obvious. In modern politics, the same joke has returned wearing a suit and carrying a spreadsheet.

Which brings us to one of the more fascinating promises emerging from the modern urban left: the government grocery store. The concept has obvious emotional appeal. Groceries are more expensive than they were in 2019. Families are frustrated. Everyone would like to see lower prices at the checkout counter. A politician who promises cheaper food is speaking directly to one of the most basic anxieties in American life.

But economics has a nasty habit of asking the question that politics prefers to avoid: Who pays for the discount?

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has promised five city-owned grocery stores offering a core basket of essential goods at prices 30 percent below typical retail. It is an attractive number. Thirty percent is the kind of figure designed to make a voter pause over the receipt and imagine........

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