23A043 Government Groceries by Jim Davies, 10/24/2023

The electronic ink had hardly dried on this spoofy ZGBlog when news reached me about plans for a real, no-spoof, copper-plated government grocery store chain in Chicago because the privately owned ones had closed due to the high level of vandalism and theft. John Riley offers a 59-second video summary from which this photo of Boris Yeltsin is clipped.

The Russian President was visiting a store in Texas and was shocked to see such a rich variety of goods on display. Government stores in the USSR were nothing like that (though they did sell vodka) and that ought to give pause to the Chicago Mayor; but it probably won't. Like all people in government, his answer to a government failure is additional government failure.

Supposing the Chicago plans mature and the City does open food stores. Let's try to predict the result. The Mayor's first, essential task would be to choose people to run the government store(s). He could:

(1) Attract employees of other, successful store chains who know the business, or
(2) Appoint bureaucrats from elsewhere, who don't.

Option (1) would be expensive, because all those qualified people will know of the previous firms' difficulties so will need to be heavily bribed tempted strongly to take the risk. But if that is chosen, the stores will open - but face the same difficulties, so will make a loss. Because the staff has to be paid that premium, the loss will be larger. Who picks up that loss? - the taxpayer, of course. That's the one advantage the Mayor has, over the honest companies that could not make profits; he can force third parties to subsidize failure.

Option (2) would lose even more, for nobody will know what they are doing; it takes very great skill to put 80,000 items on shelves when wanted, at competitive prices. Mr Yeltsin would concur.

The root problem, though, is the crime in South Chicago. Why is it prevalent, in that city and dozens of others? - all, interestingly, administered by Democrats.

Since the crime-ridden areas are also occupied mostly by Blacks, we cannot avoid the racial explanation. Evidently 60% of all US violent crime is committed by the 14% of the population that is black, so Blacks are nine times more prone to it than the rest of us, and that is startling. Why?

I think it's quite largely cultural. First their ancestors were kidnapped, stolen; and nobody told them that was wrong. Then they were enslaved, ditto. They figured out that the optimal life was to do as little work as they could get away with; the precise and polar opposite of what's needed to succeed. Later they were shown that by taking political action, Whites could deny them every job where they weren't wanted; so they learned that politics (ie, force) trumps the market.

Finally they were taught during the last century that they were so inferior that they needed special help, called "affirmative action." Imagine what that does to self-esteem.

Each phase of that aggregate experience was implemented by government. It's no surprise that as a group, they have little confidence that honest hard work will bring success and that getting good school grades matters. So the boys, especially, trash the schools and make it virtually impossible to teach. The vicious cycle has been set spinning, and so far nobody knows how to stop it.

That may explain why blacks commit so much crime, but it still leaves the problem of what to do. Given that it took 300 years of cultural indoctrination to make it, that's not likely a task that can be completed tomorrow. But a starting point is to end the existence of the entity that did all the things just listed: government. Sorry about that, Mr Mayor.