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Authored by Jonathan Turley,

When Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) ran for office, he was propelled to victory by a growing socialist movement allied with the Democratic Party. 

The Socialist movement has elected a record number of socialists in Congress.

However, Johnson now has one of the largest American cities to implement such policies with the support of the far left teacher’s union.

Years ago, I wrote how a delegation of the union went to Venezuela and heaped praise on the murderous regime’s “progress.”

Now Johnson appears to be moving toward a pilot program with great significance for socialist supporters: state-run grocery stores.

I am admittedly no fan of Johnson. 

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.

The Chicago Tribune reported the start of the feasibility study to open government-run stores as part of Johnson’s pledge to advance “innovative, whole-of-government approaches to address … inequities.”

The mayor said in a statement: 

His Economic Security Project senior adviser Ameya Pawar said that government-run stores are no different from other government programs “the way a library or the postal service operates.” It is all part of “reimagining the role government can play in our lives by exploring a public option for grocery stores via a municipally owned grocery store and market.”

Yet, we have previously “imagined” this approach in various governments with uniformly awful results.

The government is not going to run these stores at a profit when actual businesses could not do so. Instead, it is likely to supply food at a higher cost for taxpayers in the red.

What is striking is that Johnson’s office said the grocery stores would be funded with the help of the Biden Administration as well as state funds. The use of federal funds to take another stab at state-run stores was hardly embraced by Congress in prior appropriation debates. If true, it is yet another example of how Congress has allowed billions to be spent without meaningful limits, including the massive and largely unrestricted spending tied to pandemic measures. That funding has been used for everything from office upgrades to state lottery systems.

In the Soviet Union, state-run grocery stores were the subject of gallows humor. The “reimagining” of grocery stores left shelves bare with only imagined essential products. The most widely told joke spread just before the fall of the Soviet Union:

As the Johnson and Biden Administration try to make state-run stores work where the Soviet Union failed, history and economics are hardly on their side.

Of course, as University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman noted: