Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Update

Zohran Mamdani, Government Grocer

Post author By Redactor
Post date August 2, 2026
No Comments on Zohran Mamdani, Government Grocer

“Mamdani’s City Run Grocery Stores And Their Potential Market Impact” — Nathan Goldman | Forbes | July 28, 2026 11:00 AM

As part of Mamdani’s $124.7 billion budget, starting this year, New York City will build and open five stores, one per borough. The first will open in the Bronx by the end of 2027, and a second is planned for East Harlem’s La Marqueta market by 2029.

The main feature of these stores is that a core basket of goods — including produce, dairy, bread, select meat and seafood products and about 20 other staples — will be priced 30% below typical retail values. According to The New York Times, these prices will stay locked in for a month, and non-core items will sell at a designated fair market value.

These stores can offer prices at this level because they operate with a lower cost structure. Unlike bodegas, the city-run grocery stores will not pay rent or property taxes. Government-owned property is typically tax-exempt in the same way libraries, courthouses and DMVs do not pay property tax.

This foregone tax revenue creates an inherent cost advantage relative to other grocery providers. Still, the effect on the city’s bottom line is real: The city must make up forgone revenue elsewhere or absorbed it as a cost.

“Mamdani announces 30% discount on core set of goods at NYC-owned grocery stores” — Jen Maxfield and NBC New York TV Staff | NBC New York | July 27, 2026 8:32 PM

The first NYC-owned grocery store will be open by the end of 2027. Opening stores owned by the city was one of the mayor’s signature campaign pledges. The goal is to have at least one of these city-owned grocery stores in each borough.

The city also announced they are issuing an Request for Proposal as they look for third-party grocery store operators to manage the five city-run supermarkets.

“Our vision of affordable, well-run, city-owned grocery stores can only be accomplished with experienced operators who know how to source products, stock the shelves and help answer shoppers’ questions,” Mamdani said. “Today, we are also issuing an RFP for private operators to help us with the day-to-day management of the five city-run grocery stores.”

Some local politicians say the city’s $70 million project doesn’t address the root cause of higher food prices.

“I can tell you that I could give somebody $1,000 and that’ll change them being broke for the day, but it’s not gonna change how they got broke,” said Paul Muhammad, of Community Board Five.

“Zohran Mamdani Tells Jon Stewart Socialism Is Just Having a Library” — Robby Soave | Reason | 7.23.2026 4:15 PM

Now that democratic socialism is having a moment, political figures who adhere to the ideology or belong to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are fielding questions about it. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who self-identifies as a socialist, is a savvy politician, and so he quite deliberately misrepresents the definition of socialism in order to make it seem benign and unobjectionable. He is doing this frequently enough — and consistently enough — that he may be succeeding in tricking a great number of people into accepting a nonsensical, discredited, and dangerous ideology.

“Who’s Paying for the Discounts in Mamdani’s City-Run Grocery Stores?” — Meagan O’Rourke | Reason | 7.28.2026 5:27 PM

Mamdani has said that government intervention for food distribution is nothing new. On Monday, he explained that former New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was inspired to create municipally owned markets after witnessing food riots several years earlier.

“He did so because he believed in a simple definition of the task of government to make people’s lives better,” Mamdani said.

La Guardia may have been partially motivated to create municipally owned markets to make goods affordable, but Mamdani conveniently left out another part of the story. La Guardia wanted to create municipal markets (like Essex Market in the Lower East Side) to get pushcarts off the streets.

“What Mamdani Can Learn From Hugo Chávez’s Government-Run Grocery Store Debacle” — César Báez | Reason | 7.31.2026 1:40 PM

[L]ike Chávez, Mamdani will find that he can’t escape the laws of supply and demand. His evasive response to the reporter’s question suggests that he hasn’t given much thought to how the city would manage high demand for cheap groceries. One way or another, the program will require quotas. The alternative is to tolerate price-sensitive shoppers lining up outside stores to buy discount plantains.

“Zohran Mamdani Tells Jon Stewart Socialism Is Just Having a Library” — Robby Soave | Reason | 7.23.2026 4:15 PM

Now that democratic socialism is having a moment, political figures who adhere to the ideology or belong to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are fielding questions about it. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who self-identifies as a socialist, is a savvy politician, and so he quite deliberately misrepresents the definition of socialism in order to make it seem benign and unobjectionable. He is doing this frequently enough — and consistently enough — that he may be succeeding in tricking a great number of people into accepting a nonsensical, discredited, and dangerous ideology.

Thought

Bob Murphy

Once we realize “the nation” is composed of different individuals who enter the scene at various points, live for varying lengths of time, and then die, to say “we owe it to ourselves” is a complete non sequitur.
Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D., “Debt Can’t Burden Future Generations?” in Contra Krugman: Smashing the Errors of America’s Most Famous Keynesian (2018), p. 469.

Today

Fifty-six delegates to the Continental Congress of the United States signed the Declaration of Independence. The signing began on August 2, 1776, and continued for several months, not all the delegates being present at the initial signing. The signings occurred at the Pennsylvania State House — later called Independence Hall — in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Update

Fauci Refused to Answer

The revelations of the Fauci Diaries, and the non-revelations of the Senate grilling of Anthony Fauci, continue to receive commentary and reaction.

“Senator Rand Paul, who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released the journals this weekend, days before Fauci is scheduled to testify under subpoena,” wrote Connor Boyack on Substack. “Fauci’s vanity is going viral on 𝕏 because vanity is easily observable, a little funny, and confirms what half the country already suspected about him.”

So why wouldn’t Fauci answer even technical questions? Medical YouTuber John Campbell expressed more than just wonder. His video includes segments from Rand Paul worth watching:

“Let the record show,” says the senator, “that the witness has refused to answer whether there is a folder in front of him. . . .” That was after the mere second time Fauci responded with his pleading the Fifth Amendment.

For analysis of the hearing, you may not be able to find better commentary than from Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein on the Dark Horse podcast — where they explain precisely what kind of monster Fauci is:

But not everyone is on board with the criticism of the former bureaucrat. Consider this discussion on the Rising program, between libertarian Robby Soave and Democrat Lindsey Granger:

Soave begins by noting Fauci’s private recognition, prior to March 2020, that the infamous “wet market” was not the source of the coronavirus, but the amplifier. Fauci is thus clearly revealed as a liar and conspirator against the truth of the Lab Leak Hypothesis. Soave’s interlocutor, however, gamely-if-absurdly tries to defend the Fauc, minimizing the insider’s lies as non-crimes.

Meanwhile, at NPR, we can see subsidized media still pushing the zoonotic (“wet market”) explanation, as in Rachel Carlson’s “Animal spillover? Lab leak? What the science says about the origins of COVID-19” — this July 29, 2026, article is an embarrassment.

NPR is still pushing a lie. Astounding? Or just doing what insider and wannabe-insider Democrats (and other proponents of uniting big government with big business) must believe, to maintain their discredited ideology?

Boyack reminds us of the context not only of the diaries, but of the day-earlier revelation that Fauci had set up a network to give his own self awards and money. “Something clarifying happens as you read through these documents. They stop being a story about one man’s (deficient) character and become a story about a system doing exactly what it was built to do. Institutions produce whatever they pay for, and this one paid for prestige. Prestige requires certainty; certainty cannot survive open questions; therefore open questions had to be reclassified as threats. (Remember what Fauci said in November 2021? “They’re really criticizing science, because I represent science.”)”

The problem is the system itself. And it is not science. It is bureaucracy, and more than that: a scam. Fauci represents, but is not, that system. How many Americans will come to their senses about it?

NOTE: Paul Jacob wrote about the Fauci hearing on Thursday.

Thought

F. Marion Crawford

Alexander Patoff stood by his brother’s side, watching the ceremony with intense interest. He hated the Turks and despised their faith, but what he now saw appealed to the Orientalism of his nature. Himself capable of the most distant extremes of feeling, sensitive, passionate, and accustomed to delight in strong impressions, he could not fail to be moved by the profound solemnity of the scene and by the indescribable wildness of the Imam’s chant. Paul, too, was silent, and, though far less able to feel such emotions than his elder brother, the sight of such unanimous and heart-felt devotion called up strange trains of thought in his mind, and forced him to speculate upon the qualities and the character which still survived in these hereditary enemies of his nation. It was not possible, he said to himself, that such men could ever be really conquered. They might be driven from the capital of the East by overwhelming force, but they would soon rally in greater numbers on the Asian shore. They might be crushed for a moment, but they could never be kept under, nor really dominated. Their religion might be oppressed and condemned by the oppressor, but it was of the sort to gain new strength at every fresh persecution. To slay such men was to sow dragon’s teeth and to reap a harvest of still more furious fanatics, who, in their turn being destroyed, would multiply as the heads of the Hydra beneath the blows of Heracles. The even rise and fall of those long lines of stalwart Mussulmans seemed like the irrepressible tide of an ocean, which if restrained, would soon break every barrier raised to obstruct it.
Francis Marion Crawford, a passage from his 1887 novel Paul Patoff, Chapter Two.

Today

Slavery Ended

On August 1, 1834, Great Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 took force, freeing slaves throughout much of the British empire.

William Wilberforce, one of the country’s main anti-slavery politicians, had lived long enough in July 1833 to hear that the bill would pass, dying on the 29th, with the bill receiving royal assent a month later.

August 1 births include Francis Scott Key (1779), composer of the poem “The Star-Spangled Banner”; American authors Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (1815) and Herman Melville (1819); and Thomas E. Woods, Jr. (1972), historian, popularizer of Austrian economics, and podcaster of the Tom Woods Show.

initiative, referendum, and recall

Put It Out of Their Missouri

Post author By Redactor
Post date July 31, 2026
No Comments on Put It Out of Their Missouri

Missouri, Amendment 4, citizens initiative

Is there no good idea a politician cannot spoil?

Take what’s on next Tuesday’s Missouri ballot. “Amendment 4 was my idea, but I am voting against it,” Ron Calzone wrote on Monday in The Missouri Times.

Mr. Calzone had advanced what is called a Concurrent Majority Ratification process. It was introduced into the legislature by Representative Bill Kidd as HJR 132 in 2022. And then politicians started revising.

Everyone agreed, says Calzone, that Missouri’s constitution “was too easy to amend,” considering “the fact that 50% + 1 of the vote can come from just the urban areas” and thereby inflict upon less-populated rural regions a “Tyranny of the Majority.”

The original notion was “to require a broad consensus before imposing laws on the People.” Before the state constitution could be changed, a majority of voters in a majority of legislative districts would have to concur.

The current Amendment 4, however, though promoted as a solution, really adds three humongous problems:

The amendment applies only to citizen-initiated constitutional revisions — not legislative ones.This is the double standard regarding initiative processes we’ve seen legislatures try over and over again, across the country. Politicians like carving for themselves all sorts of advantages.*
The current measure would require approval of measures in all, not just a majority, of the state’s eight congressional districts. Almost impossible to achieve, it would reinforce a status quo, certainly not rein current powers in.
It shifts the power to alter the constitution from the people to the legislature.

One could write whole histories of how politicians can screw up a good reform. Amendment 4 is now no reform at all.

Doesn’t deserve the name.

Thankfully, Missourians can kill it. On Tuesday.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Legislators complain there have been too many amendments but as Calzone points out: “The fact is, over 80% of the amendments to the Missouri Constitution since 1910 were proposed by the legislature.”

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags Amendment 4, citizens initiative, Missouri

Today

DeFoe Pelted

On July 31, 1703, Daniel Defoe — who would later become famous as the author of Robinson Crusoe and other literary works — was placed in a pillory for the crime of seditious libel. The sedition pertained to a satirical pamphlet he had published, “The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church.” The mob pelted him with flowers.

Thought

Poor Richard

Make yourselves sheep, and the wolves will eat you.
Benjamin Franklin, letter to Thomas Cushing (1773).

Accountability crime and punishment Fifth Amendment rights insider corruption national politics & policies

Fauci Can’t Lie

Anthony Fauci, Congress, Covid, 5th Amendment

Is there any crime for which Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, will be prosecuted?

The multi-millionaire former “public servant” received a full and unconditional pardon “FOR ANY OFFENSES against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in . . .”

Courtesy of Mr. Biden — or his auto-pen.

“Biden backdated the pardon to 2014, a date nearly six years before the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 emerged,” Newsweek reported a year and a half ago.

Why? Come on, man! Because it “shields Fauci from allegations tied to U.S.-funded gain-of-function research in addition to his work during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

So, Fauci is immune from prosecution for

a decade’s worth of skirting U.S. domestic restrictions, to fund gang-of-function research at the lab in Wuhan, China;
for each and every lie he told Senator Rand Paul and others in Congress; and
for any other fraud — such as using his federal employees to solicit more than a million dollars in cash prizes for him personally.

So when Fauci — formerly known as “the Science” — asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times before Congress (NBC says 106), refusing to answer questions about his past role as a government official, it was illegitimate. Because on those matters, he cannot be incriminated.

“No person,” reads the amendment, “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” There can be no criminal case brought for his past lies.

But the problem for Dr. Fauci is that he can be prosecuted for telling those lies again to Congress. Like at yesterday’s hearing.

Past lies? You’re pardoned, Doc.

But Fauci cannot repeat his lies. That would be a new crime.

And since he wants those falsehoods to stand, he will not speak.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.