It seems bizarre, in the year of our Lord 2025, to be debating whether the government should run the grocery stores. History has thoughtfully answered this question with multiple experiments, from the old Soviet Union to modern-day Venezuela. The answer is: “No! Absolutely not! Are you crazy?”

But here is Zohran Mamdani, the winner of New York’s Democratic mayoral primary, suggesting that the city needs a “public option” for groceries: five pilot stores, one in each borough, to help bring prices down and provide oases in the city’s “food deserts.” Forget the old-school communist talk about socializing the means of production — Mamdani wants to socialize the means of consumption.

So very well, let’s lay out the problems with this idea, starting with the fact that almost everyone in the city has a grocery store within walking distance, except for the inmates at Rikers Island and the residents of a few outlying neighborhoods in Queens. There’s no obvious market gap for the city to fill.

Nor is there any reason to think the government can make the food in its stores more affordable than what’s available privately. The idea of a public option is drawn from left-wing health care advocacy. Though I’m skeptical it would work, at least you can argue the health care sector has serious market failures that the government might be able to solve. The grocery business, by contrast, is one of the most hypercompetitive and efficient parts of our economy, with profit margins that have historically averaged around 1 to 3 percent.

Even saving New Yorkers that percentage would be a challenge, because it’s really hard just to break even in the grocery business. It takes extensive experience and a relentless focus on implementation to keep the right stock on the shelves, to prevent theft while providing attractive and easily accessible displays, to cultivate workers who provide excellent customer service, and to keep spoilage down to acceptable levels. Order too few perishables, such as meat and produce, and your disgruntled customers will leave empty-handed; order too much and you’ll have to throw it away after it passes its expiration date, eating those narrow margins and plunging the business into the red.

Even Amazon, with one of the best logistics operations in the world, has faced challenges trying to enter the brick-and-mortar grocery market. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.) Why would the government do better? Because it will save money by buying in bulk? A five-store chain has less negotiating power than Gristedes or Whole Foods.

What’s that I hear from the back? They can save on rent by parking stores on city-owned land? My friend, let me introduce you to the economic concept of opportunity costs: A “free” location isn’t actually free if it means forgoing money you could have collected by leasing it, not to mention the tax revenue you’ll lose by substituting a city operation for a successful business.

Now let’s add in the factors that could drive the city’s costs well above those of private stores, like civil service salaries and onerous government procurement rules. It seems as though the only way the city can outcompete private grocers is by selling at a loss, which would harm the private sellers, give richer New Yorkers a subsidy they don’t need and create black markets where people resell their subsidized groceries. It would cost the city a lot of money that could have been spent on more useful projects.

The best you can say about any of this is that Mamdani might not really mean it. It’s just something that sounds great in a TikTok video. In fact, that’s the best you can say about many of his policy proposals: the rent freeze that will distort New York’s already grossly misshapen housing market, the free buses that would open up a $700 million hole in the transit authority’s budget, the stiff tax increases that risk an exodus of higher-income taxpayers who pay the bulk of the city’s income taxes.

The rent freeze, one of Mamdani’s most destructive policies, would be well within his powers, because the mayor appoints the members of New York’s Rent Guidelines Board. And surely it matters that his instincts tend toward meddling in markets that are already working well, just as it mattered that Donald Trump was irrationally obsessed with imposing tariffs on our trading partners. You can argue, as Trump’s supporters did, for taking him “seriously, but not literally.” But in the hands of a charismatic zealot, seriously bad ideas have a way of becoming literally awful realities.