New York just elected price controls. History knows how this ends

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday swept all three of his endorsed congressional primaries, ousting two sitting members of Congress. The socialist movement now controls more of New York’s congressional delegation than it did two days ago.

Mamdani’s platform of city-owned grocery stores, a rent freeze on 1 million apartments, and a $30 minimum wage has a word for what it is. Price controls. Tuesday’s sweep signals the socialist movement is growing. The New Democrat Coalition is already pushing the same agenda in Congress.

The New Democrat Coalition released its “Affordability Agenda” in February. Among their initiatives: prescription price caps, directing the DOJ to target grocery store “bad actors,” and a bill banning electronic shelf labels in large grocery stores. They aren’t the first to promise lower costs through government intervention. Obamacare made the same promise in 2010. Reorganizing the individual insurance market increased costs, reduced access, and reduced competition. Obamacare premiums rose 129% from 2013 to 2019. In 2026, they rose another 26%. Enhanced subsidies cost taxpayers $14 billion per year. Nowhere is the socialist agenda more dangerous than in healthcare.

Elizabeth Wick of Texas was notified last year that her monthly Obamacare premium would increase 60% to $1,380. She was also told she may lose assistance if enhanced federal subsidies, initiated during COVID-19, were not extended. The subsidies were not extended. Democrats triggered the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, 43 days, fighting over whether to preserve them. Subsidies expired Dec. 31, 2025, leaving millions facing the full premium increase Wick had feared. Her predicament was years in the making, the result of heavy-handed government intervention that promised to drive down costs but did the opposite.

Prescription price caps poll well. But capping what a manufacturer can charge doesn’t lower development costs. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found price controls abroad reduce global pharmaceutical research and development by $56 billion per year, costing the world 25 new drugs annually. Eliminate the return, and you eliminate the investment.

It doesn’t stop with healthcare. Remember, progressives want into your supermarket too. They claim grocers are gouging consumers. Grocery margins have always been historically low. The Food Industry Association puts average profit margins at 1.7%. There’s nothing to squeeze. Price controls through DOJ and FTC enforcement mean less food on shelves and families paying more.

We’ve watched this movie before. Nixon announced a 90-day freeze on wages and prices in August 1971. Inflation hit 11% by 1974 once controls were lifted. Carter doubled down with his own guidelines in October 1978. The Government Accountability Office concluded Carter’s controls had “no discernible effect on inflation.”

MAMDANI-ENDORSED SOCIALIST DARIALIZA CHEVALIER PREVIOUSLY POSTED ABOUT USING US FLAG AS A NAPKIN

Boris Yeltsin, who would later become Russia’s first president, visited a Houston grocery store in 1989, bewildered by the food on the shelves. The Soviet central planning commission, Gosplan, set every price and production quota. It failed. Thirty-five years later, World Cup fans from dozens of countries are posting the same reaction from Walmart and Costco aisles. One Scottish supporter, with tears, said: “The America we are experiencing is the one we were promised growing up.” The free market built those shelves. Central planning emptied them.

The public was promised affordable healthcare in 2010. Sixteen years later, Wick’s premium rose 60% in one year. If Mamdani’s socialist agenda advances, Washington bureaucrats decide which treatments exist, your costs shift but never shrink, and fewer doctors remain to see you. The result never changes. It’s simple economics.

Chuck Flint is executive director of the Coalition for Affordability and Prosperity.