Government: Now Solving Problems You Didn’t Know You Had

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, May 28, 2026

 

On the night socialist Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, he expressed his vision of a wildly more expansive government.

 

“We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about,” Mamdani told supporters in his victory speech. “For years, those in City Hall have only helped those who can help them. But on January 1, we will usher in a city government that helps everyone.”

 

Clearly, some people think “everyone” includes people who desire vegan cream cheese on their bagels. Over the weekend, “tech journalist” Taylor Lorenz expressed disappointment that more New York City bagel shops didn’t offer a vegan cream cheese option, adding that in Los Angeles, the bagel shops “at least use cashew-based vegan cream cheese” rather than soy-based Tofutti.

 

“I hope Zohran can remedy this,” she said.

 

Perhaps Lorenz’s desire for Mamdani to step in and require bagel shops to offer vegan schmear is just the latest rambling of a lunatic. (She has spent the past few years cheering on Luigi Mangione for killing health care executive Brian Thompson, called Joe Biden a “war criminal,” and accused citizens of “raw-dogging the air,” by refusing to wear surgical masks in public.)

 

But Mamdani’s quest to make sure there is no problem too small for government to tackle has spread to the ostensibly sane. For instance, the mayor is already 100 days into planning a network of five city-owned grocery stores across New York City’s boroughs, at a cost of $30 million for the first location alone — a store in East Harlem that won’t open until the end of 2027.

 

There are, incidentally, roughly 45 grocery stores already within a 35-minute walk of the proposed site, a detail the mayor has not found relevant in his planning. In order to justify spending taxpayer money on grocery stores, Mamdani claimed that food prices in New York had increased 66 percent, a completely bogus statistic that measures spending on groceries but says nothing about prices.

 

The owner of grocery store chain Gristedes compared Mamdani’s scheme to “the bread lines of the old Soviet Union.” Even Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul, who is not exactly a Rand Paul acolyte, felt compelled to announce, “I favor free enterprise.”

 

This is the pattern Mamdani and his ideological allies have established: Private industry creates something, people come to regard it as a necessity, and government then declares it a human right and inserts itself into the provision of the thing — often at extraordinary expense and inevitably with worse results.

 

Grocery stores are just the latest iteration. Before that, it was health care, childcare, and broadband internet. The progression is always the same: Someone builds something useful, enough people use it that it becomes expected, and then a politician announces that the market has failed and only government can be trusted to manage it. The fact that private grocery stores managed to stock their shelves for decades without mayoral supervision is treated as beside the point.

 

Yet the award for using the power of government to solve a nonexistent problem goes to Democratic U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, who is using federal power to ensure that the people of her state can watch professional football for free.

 

Recently, Netflix announced that this fall it would broadcast the Green Bay Packers’ game against the Los Angeles Rams on Thanksgiving Eve, meaning that viewers would need access to the streaming service to watch it. Baldwin’s proposed “For the Fans Act” would mandate that professional leagues provide every local fan a way to watch every game played by every team in their state — no streaming blackouts, no platform exclusivity — or face legal consequences. The bill covers baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and soccer.

 

Per a press release, Baldwin boasted that her bill was drawing “national attention.” The national attention it appears to have drawn is this column, in which I am using it as an example of the most asinine piece of legislation Congress could possibly consider. So mission accomplished!

 

Of course, the NFL and streaming services arrive at their arrangements through contracts freely negotiated between consenting parties. That this has made it expensive and confusing to follow professional sports is genuinely irritating. It is not, however, a civil rights emergency. American culture produces many entertainment options, few of which require the federal government to step in and provide them for free. It costs money to create an entertainment product, and asking people to pay for something they badly want to watch is not too much to ask.

 

Further, Baldwin is evidently unaware of the famous lengths that Packer fans will go to in order to see their team play. She thinks fans tough enough to sit in below-zero temperatures for hours on end will be unable to figure out how to watch their favorite team on television. Perhaps she has never heard of “sports bars” festooned with “televisions” that show the games. Getting Wisconsinites to drink at a local tavern is, famously, not a difficult endeavor.

 

This isn’t even the most outrageous sports-related government action in Wisconsin this year. Republicans and Democrats alike recently enacted a bill that allows taxpayer funds to help pay name, image, and likeness (NIL) funds to athletes at the University of Wisconsin. If you are an alumnus or fan of another school in America but live in Wisconsin, your tax money is now being spent to help give the Badgers a competitive advantage over your preferred school. State politicians rammed this scam through the legislature in the time it takes a running back to run the length of a football field.

 

This is what happens when government establishes the precedent that it will solve everyone’s problems. Once you’ve accepted that the mayor of New York City should ensure grocery availability, it’s a small step to insisting that a U.S. senator should ensure football availability, or that taxpayers should pay salaries for a favored college quarterback. Once you’ve established that “access” to a thing is the government’s obligation to provide, the word “access” expands to cover whatever the constituent currently wants and cannot easily obtain. Today, it’s vegan cream cheese and Packers games. Tomorrow, it will be something else that is already available but perhaps inconvenient.

 

The Mamdani model — no concern is too small for the government to care about — brings about learned helplessness, teaching people to rely on their elected leaders to solve their problems. It, for example, leads people distressed by the changing face of the news media to start demanding that the government begin funding newspapers to keep them alive. (Of course, a newspaper reliant on the government for its existence would be loath to criticize the government, making many even more biased than they are now, which is why some are withering away to begin with.)

 

What Mamdani’s philosophy actually produces is a government large enough to mandate what goes on your bagel and who carries your football games, staffed by people who are constitutionally convinced that private citizens cannot be trusted to locate a grocery store or a streaming service on their own. The market built the NFL. The market built Whole Foods. The market built the internet that Taylor Lorenz used to complain about her cream cheese options in the first place.

 

Government wasn’t there at the creation. It just shows up at the end, declares itself essential, and sends you the bill.