What a Bodega Taught the Socialist

By Tim Chapman

Sunday, December 14, 2025

 

New York City’s socialist Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani walked into a Queens bodega recently and stumbled his way into Milton Friedman–style conservativism. This sentence would shock most people, but it happened. In one of his latest small-business campaign videos, the world’s newest socialist darling unintentionally promoted beating back burdensome government through deregulation.

 

Mugged by the reality of running a bodega, Mamdani now wants to cut fines and fees by 50 percent, expedite permitting, and cut the bureaucratic red tape that slows new businesses from opening their doors. Blissfully unaware, he lamented: “You shouldn’t have to fill out 24 forms and go through seven agencies to start a barbershop.” Then, he channeled his inner Elon Musk and announced a new “mom-and-pop czar” who will coordinate city agencies to improve turnaround times and help businesses navigate the cumbersome regulatory system. A little New York City DOGE?

 

This is a surprising rhetorical change for someone who campaigned on a full-scale socialist takeover of the world’s financial capital. Throughout the race, Mamdani argued that more government would make New York more affordable. His Election Night declaration that “there is no problem too large for government to solve” made it clear for all.

 

Yet only weeks before officially being sworn in — and confronted with the daunting realities of governing a complex economy — he unwittingly conceded that rather than solve “large problems,” big government’s numerous rules and regulations actually drive up costs and make life unaffordable.

 

Mamdani’s sudden embrace of deregulation, however, should not be mistaken for a broader change of heart. Nothing else in his agenda suggests one.

 

Mamdani is still the same man who campaigned, and won, on Communist Manifesto–inspired policies that would smother any remaining chance of economic revival in New York and, in turn, make the city even more expensive. Let’s not forget that he endorsed “seizing the means of production” and promised rent freezes and government-run grocery stores and child care and free public transport, then proposed race-based tax hikes on “richer and whiter neighborhoods” to pay for it all.

 

These proposals are the core of his platform. And they rest on the same flawed assumption that has guided socialist command economics for a century: that affordability is created when government consolidates more control. In fact, the opposite is true.

 

Mamdani’s bodega deregulation moment shines a light on his silver-spoon socialist ignorance. It is his proposed policies and that very ideology that create bureaucratic encumbrances and make everything more expensive. The same red tape that Mamdani now concedes is suffocating bodegas is driving up the price of almost everything New Yorkers buy, build, or try to open.

 

New York City has some of the most complex and lengthy permitting timelines of any major city, a barrier that continues to worsen its housing shortage and undermine business competitiveness. The city is also known for its “complex regulatory environment,” with more than 6,000 rules and roughly 250 business-related licenses and permits, each accompanied by its own compliance process. New York City is still missing 30,000 small-business jobs that never came back after Governor Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous mismanagement during the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, NYC’s overall cost of living is 130 percent above the national average.

 

Working families live in this reality every day through higher grocery bills, higher rent, and fewer neighborhood stores. Investors and entrepreneurs are jetting off to states such as Florida and Texas because taxes are too high, compliance is too expensive, and the regulatory environment is nearly impossible to navigate. Why bother?

 

The cost of living in NYC keeps climbing because the cost of doing business has been ratcheted up to the moon by a city government that inserts itself into nearly every step of the economic process.

 

New York is not expensive because the private sector is failing. It is expensive because the private sector is handcuffed to a New York City bureaucrat at every turn.

 

Small government has always offered the opposite. Fewer, consistently applied rules give businesses the ability to plan, invest, and open their doors without procedural bottlenecks. Lower taxes keep capital circulating in neighborhoods rather than siphoning it off into the government’s treasury. A restrained regulatory posture gives today’s entrepreneurs the freedom to solve the problems of today without the bureaucrats of the past holding them back. These are the basic economic realities that make goods affordable, support job creation, and keep cities livable.

 

Mamdani’s bodega epiphany points toward this reality, even if unintentionally. His interest in reducing fines, accelerating permitting, and simplifying basic processes is an acknowledgment that government restraint is not an ideological preference but a prerequisite for affordability.

 

If Mamdani extended this logic beyond bodegas, he might actually deliver the affordability he campaigned on. He has already taken one small step. The city would benefit from several more.