Chicago to try state run grocery stores?

Turley addresses this absurdity in a Friday post.

I love Chicago where I was born and raised. However, rising taxes and crime had led many to leave, particularly businesses. This includes grocery chains. Walmart, Walgreens, Aldi are just some of the companies closing stores.

Johnson’s solution is telling. Rather than address the underlying conditions, he is suggesting a solution that has failed historically — government-run stores. Indeed, the failure in dealing with crime and hostile business environments has allowed socialist activists to realize a major new socialist agenda item.

Now Turley believes this will result in higher prices and empty shelves. He sees the crime problem as a pretense to install socialism, much as Covid was used to justify changing the election laws. Not saying he is incorrect, but I believe the motivation here is slightly different for the Mayor. I believe he intends to run municipal grocery stores as any other grocery store has been run, only these stores will be advised not to make any aggressive moves to stop retail theft (aka shoplifting).

Instead, I believe that Mayor Brandon Johnson simply believes that if you subsidize these stores with enough tax-payer money that they can survive the massive amounts of inventory loss and please everyone (honest shoppers and thieves alike). In other words, I believe he wants the government to step in and do what private stores will not (and cannot do), which is run at an enormous loss as a public service.

You see the whole "retail" problem in the minds of many of these liberals isn't the theft. The real problem that they see is that individual owners of these stores refuse to suck it up and lose money. They see the idea of turning a profit as capitalism at it's worst. It undermines the very concept of how people like Johnson sees the world where everyone should be free to exist without any contribution to society.

The irony is that someone has to make money to pay taxes in order to fund the sort of nonsense that liberals generally see as just and fair. When you demonize the idea of making money at the same time you are demanding someone subsidize the programs desired to allow people to get by without the doldrums of earning an honest living, you start to collapse upon yourself.

These retailers are generally recruited by cities and town and fought over because they bring a windfall of new business and tax revenues to communities. When you suggest that what used to be a large tax revenue will become a drain on taxpayer money, the fiscal problems become very apparent for most people. However, most people do not include socialists like Johnson, who do apparently believe that money grows on trees (or at least the Federal Government has money growing trees to work with). What will happen to these types of politicians when they no longer have anyone else's money to spend?