Small business owners are staring down the looming threat of intrusive government involvement and unfair competitive practices in their day-to-day operations. This November, voters will decide whether local neighborhood employers get room to grow or get buried under the socialist playbook now being repackaged as affordability.
The scenario is currently unfolding in New York City, where socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has pitched taxpayer-subsidized, city-run grocery stores as an affordability solution, a promise small business owners are seeing right through.
Sounding the alarm, the National Supermarket Association sued the Mamdani administration, reasoning that millions of dollars in city subsidies would make it harder for businesses to compete against the government. The Multicultural Business Coalition filed lawsuits, arguing that business owners’ civil rights would be violated if the city-run stores were to open.
City-run grocery stores will put mom-and-pop general stores and corner store bodegas in the impossible position of competing against government-subsidized stores. In an industry where average profit margins run just 1% to 3%, even a poorly run city store could undercut private competitors simply because it is not operating under the same rules.
We have seen this disaster before. Kansas City poured roughly $18 million into its city-backed Sun Fresh Market over a decade, yet the store still closed amid theft and empty shelves. The result was a taxpayer-funded failure that compelled the city to later cut its free bus program to help cover the gap.
Forcing small grocers to compete with a government-subsidized rival would mean fewer local jobs, less investment, and more empty storefronts in the very neighborhoods Mamdani claims to protect. The fiscal warning for the government is similarly sharp. Comptroller candidate Joseph Hernandez estimated each store would net about $5.4 million in sales but lose about $1.5 million a year, creating an estimated $78 million taxpayer cost in the first year.
Mamdani’s socialist attack on small businesses also creeps into the housing market. The mayor’s rent freeze may sound like relief for tenants, but it shifts the cost of rising insurance, maintenance, taxes, and utilities onto building owners, including smaller landlords without the scale or reserves of large real estate firms. Tenant advocates estimate the freeze would cost rental owners roughly $6.8 billion over four years and cause financial distress for families.
To no surprise, that interventionist approach continues to grow. Mamdani’s POWER Act would broaden who can sue and over what claims, trapping businesses in costly legal challenges and further signaling that New York City is hostile to investment.
Mamdani knows his base. That’s why he’s surrounding himself with a familiar crowd of left-wing ideologues. By tapping former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan as chairwoman of the board of directors for the NYC Economic Development Corporation, Mamdani has signaled a regulate-first conviction that will force entrepreneurs to absorb the consequences of fanciful policies.
At the FTC, Khan regularly ignored economic data that conveyed her rules and proposals would disproportionately impact small businesses, imposed new barriers making it difficult for small businesses to scale through mergers or acquisitions, and pursued high-profile antitrust cases. Her quixotic efforts wasted significant taxpayer dollars and inadvertently weakened the FTC’s authority.
THE DSA ISN’T NAIVE — IT’S SEDITIOUS. OUTLAW THEM NOW
Like Mamdani and Khan, the city’s Deputy Mayor of Economic Justice, Julie Su, is also set to deploy the socialist agenda. Much of Su’s overregulation, dating back to her Biden-Harris tenure at the Department of Labor, has been tossed by the courts for exceeding authority or finalizing rules that lacked a factual basis. This track record of failure and controversy will not stop her from working to impose similar policies on New York City’s small businesses.
America was built on free enterprise, fair competition, and an entrepreneur’s capacity to launch their business without government actively working against them. When voters head to the ballot box in November, they must keep in mind how socialists’ heavy-handed policies cripple the small businesses that keep the country alive.
Karen Kerrigan is president & CEO of the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council.