On Friday, Fox’s Martha MacCallum was interviewing Gustavo Gordillo, the co-chair of New York City's Democratic Socialists of America, about the city's plan to spend $30 million building government-run grocery stores.
She asked the obvious question: what happens to the bodegas down the street?
His answer: "If one publicly owned grocery store that brings prices down is enough to put someone out of business, then maybe they shouldn't have been in that business in the first place."
Oh.
So, a city government with the tax revenue of 8.5 million people—including the taxes paid by the bodega owner himself—is going to open a store across the street from him, undercut his prices using his own money, and when he goes under, well, he had it coming.
That's the view of fairness by the movement that claims to be fighting for the little guy. Of course the bodega owner is the little guy, but the socialists aren’t going to let that messy little bit get in the way of their agenda.
I regret to inform you that it gets worse. Because this story is about to go from absurd to tragic.
See, Gordillo's family emigrated from Peru when he was a child. He grew up outside Miami, made his way to Yale, and now runs the DSA in New York.
Peru at the end of the 1980s was Alan García's socialist catastrophe. Populist spending, nationalizations, price controls, empty shelves, and inflation so violent that prices could double in a matter of weeks. The Shining Path Maoist guerrillas, fighting a “people’s war,” massacred (or disappeared) more than 70,000 people.
Gordillo’s parents crossed a hemisphere to get their son away from that.
When Martha asked him why his family came here, he said Peru's misery was caused by "the imposition of capitalism and American imperialism."
Oh, ok. So, his parents fled to America because of *checks notes* America.
Of course they did.
Listen, as a history, this explanation is total nonsense, but as a strategy, it's brilliant.
There is very little cultural power right now in gratitude—in thanking the country that took your family in, or in telling the unfashionable truth that socialism wrecked your homeland and American liberty is why you got to go to Yale. But there is enormous power in grievance.
The mantle of the oppressed comes with moral authority, media attention, and—in New York City—actual political power.
A poll last year found that 62% of Americans between 18 and 29 have a favorable view of socialism. A third of them view communism favorably. Those are the voters who put Zohran Mamdani in City Hall on a platform of government grocery stores and frozen rents on a million apartments.
It’s worth noting that his strongest support came from those with college degrees.
To be clear, this isn’t a one-sided problem. So-called conservatives are just as guilty of supporting government welfare and anti-liberty politicians as those on the left.
When the government hands out bailouts, subsidies, and sweetheart contracts to favored corporations, it’s shockingly similar to what Gordillo is proposing. More shocking is the fact that so many on the right don’t seem to see it.
TARP, farm subsidies, stadium deals, the Export-Import Bank quietly backstopping loans for politically connected exporters—every one of these is the state picking winners and losers with other people's money. Conservatives can be furious at the DSA all they want, but their own “team” has been running a nicer-sounding version of the same play for a very long time.
I think that young people noticed.
They watched banks get rescued while their parents lost houses. They watched during COVID as governors shut down mom and pop stores and labeled churches as "nonessential" while the big-box store with a lobbyist stayed open and posted record profits. They watch accounts that track congressional stock portfolios and wonder how lawmakers keep beating the market they regulate.
They are right about the rigging. They are catastrophically wrong about the remedy.
All of that is capitalism corrupted—wealth flowing to the politically connected instead of to people who earned it by serving customers. The answer to government favoritism for the well-connected is not government favoritism run by different people, it's government favoritism for nobody.
It’s not really surprising that socialism sounds good to so many young people.
A huge part of it is historical illiteracy. Illiteracy that is manufactured—maybe not always on purpose, but reliably—by the institution that, like it or not, raises most American children.
Government schools are themselves socialist enterprises. They’re funded by compulsory taxation, insulated from competition, and handed their customers by street address. Their attendance is even enforced by armed men and robed judges.
Everything Gordillo wants for groceries, we accepted for education a century ago. A "free" government provider, bankrolled by taxes on the very families it pulls away from private alternatives, driving those alternatives out of business neighborhood by neighborhood.
If a tax-funded grocery store crushing the bodega is tyranny, what do we call a tax-funded system that did exactly that to independent schooling generations ago?
Make no mistake, an institution built on the socialist model has no particular incentive to teach the case against itself.
So kids learn the Great Depression happened, but they don't learn how FDR's meddling deepened it and dragged it out. They learn the Soviet Union collapsed, but they don't learn about the engineered famines, the bread lines, the informant in every apartment block, or the basic economic reason a country without prices cannot feed its own people.
The syllabus never lingers on García's Peru. Or Mao's tens of millions starved. Or Venezuelans lining up for toilet paper and eating zoo animals.
Every single one of those stories is an argument for limiting the exact power that funds administrator salaries and pads retirement accounts. And so, so-called history and civics is pre-filtered, with capitalism's sins itemized in detail, and socialism's body count reduced to a paragraph about good intentions that went a little sideways.
Gee, surely it'll work next time.
Kids spend something like 13,000 hours of their early life marinating in an environment where the state providing life's necessities is simply the natural order of things. They graduate fluent in grievance and illiterate in economics, and then we act shocked when 62% of them think socialism sounds great.
None of this would matter much if families had kept the role of whole-person formation for themselves. Unfortunately, too many well-intending parents handed off their most important job decades ago, naively assuming that the state's schools would pass down ideas the state has every incentive to ignore.
A civilization that assumes its kids will absorb its values by osmosis has written its own obituary.
Liberty is an inheritance, and inheritances don't transmit themselves. They get handed down deliberately, on purpose, by someone who knows how much it matters, or they vanish in a single generation.
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Gustavo Gordillo's parents crossed the world to give their son liberty, and he somehow still turned out a socialist.
You and I only have to cross the living room to have access to all the tools we need to stop our kids from following Gustavo’s path.
We just have to talk to our kids about the real and true principles that have always led to the best chance at human flourishing. We should tell them why those who came before were so suspicious of concentrated power. We should tell them what happened in Peru, and Venezuela, and every other place where somebody promised that life could be “free” and they could still retain their individual liberty.
We have to relay these truths early and often, because if we don't, somebody else is going to teach them a very different story.
The bodega owner in New York is finding out which future he's living in.
The question is whether the rest of us act before our own kids explain to us, with total sincerity, that if we’ve just lost everything because of socialist laws, then we probably shouldn't have been in that business in the first place.
Yikes.
— Connor
