New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s city grocery store proposal is not a serious socialist threat to free enterprise. We already know they don’t work: Baldwin Market (2019-1924), owned by the town of Baldwin, Florida, went out of business after operating with losses every year. Military commissaries lose $1.57 billion every year. 

Mamdani’s supermarkets—if they ever open, and none are scheduled to even open until late next year—will be no different. Anyone even mildly aware of how government works knows it will bring the cost controls of the Pentagon and the personal service of the Registry of Motor Vehicles to grocery stores. 

Mamdani is selling his government grocery store as a means of lowering prices, as the city’s website notes:

“The city-owned grocery initiative is designed to lower costs on everyday staples by using public ownership to eliminate costs that are currently passed on to consumers.”

But grocery stores have among the lowest profit margins among any industry, and—unless they are talking about removing expensive health and cleanliness regulations from the government supermarkets—there aren’t any major costs to cut. Its damage will be limited to loss of tax dollars to New York City residents, plus, likely, a haven for rodents to spread disease across the five boroughs.

For all the Republican fear-mongering over Democratic Party socialism, the Democrats have had a non-existent record of getting their much-touted socialist schemes enacted; even when President Barack Obama had an electoral mandate for a “public option” on health care and a majority in both the U.S. House and Senate, Democrats couldn’t get it passed.

But President Donald Trump’s copying of China’s “golden share” concept via executive order by taking shares in private companies is, unfortunately, a much more real, damaging, and sustainable form of socialism.

China’s policy has for more than a decade been to take small shares in what the Communist Party deems critical industries and regulate them through these “golden shares,” which endow the government with special voting rights and veto power over certain corporate directions. Reuters reported in 2023 on the Chinese government taking “golden shares” in Ali Baba’s parent company with the following description:

“These golden shares, typically equal to about 1% of a firm, are bought by government-backed funds or companies which gain board representation and/or veto rights for key business decisions.”

Similarly, as the Council on Foreign Relations reported in April, “Notably, when the U.S. government obtained a stake in U.S. Steel, in June 2025, it received a ‘golden share’ that gave it the power to veto major business decisions.”

The Trump administration even designated its golden shares in U.S. Steel (a subsidiary of Nippon Steel of Japan) as a “Class G” share (with the G for golden). So the Trump administration is not only copying the Communist Chinese model of corporate control without any explicit legislative order from Congress, it’s copying the popular nomenclature to describe China’s policy as well. For example, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutkick boasted in June 2025:

President Trump has secured a perpetual Golden Share as part of Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel. This partnership between the United States and Nippon Steel includes historic $14 billion investment in U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel that will revitalize this strategic and…

— Howard Lutnick (@howardlutnick) June 14, 2025

Now, Trump supporters may counter that the concept of “golden shares” originated in Thatcherite Britain, not Communist China. And there is a kernel of truth to that, even if the defense falls flat upon further inspection. 

In the early 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s Tories were trying to privatize some government-owned enterprises, and settled on a compromise where the government would privatize but retain a small share of stock and a veto over sensitive companies like the armament industry. That was indeed the beginning of the “golden share” concept. 

The difference here is that the Trump administration, like the Chinese, are not using the golden shares to privatize socialist entities like Margaret Thatcher, but to have the government gain control over otherwise private entities. 

Moreover, unlike Trump and the Chinese, the Thatcherites acted within a law passed by the legislature, the British Parliament’s 1985 Companies Act. Trump’s corporate socialism has been enacted in his second term without any precedent in the U.S. government, and without the slightest pretense of an explicit grant of legislative authority from Congress. There is no law from Congress giving the executive branch permission to buy stock in private companies, though there are laws like the Joe Biden era CHIPS Act of 2022 that give massive $52.7 billion in federal subsidies from suffering taxpayers to the already wealthy tech sector, funds the Trump Administration has used in part to buy the shares. 

Trump administration apologists would argue they just used laws like the CHIPS Act and other, older defense production laws “creatively” to buy stock in private companies. But that’s just another way of saying they ignored the law and desperately scampered about looking for excuses to justify violating the law after-the-fact.

Another counter-argument may be to question whether Trump’s policy is actually socialism. Merriam-Webster defines socialism as “Any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods” or “a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state.”

In Trump’s program, there is a level of both government ownership and government control, just as there is in the Chinese system. Because government only exercises great influence and a veto, and not total control, and because government has not taken majority-controlling ownership in the companies, one could argue this is not full-blown socialism.

Moreover, it’s the Trump administration itself that has argued that government “golden shares” transfer operational control over a company to the government in an August 2020 Executive Order:

“At this time, action must be taken to address the threat posed by one mobile application in particular, TikTok…TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories. This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.”

Keep in mind that the Chinese Communist golden share only included the China-based subsidiary (China Douyin Information Service) and not the main corporate ByteDance board (so it was a lot like the Nippon Steel/U.S. Steel deal). Trump issued another alarmist Executive Order in January 2025 warning about TikTok/ByteDance control by the Chinese government through the golden share.

Now, if a golden share has the effect of giving a government “control” over a company, as the White House argued in its executive orders on TikTok, then would that not also apply to U.S. government-owned golden shares? And does that not also relate to the very definition of socialism requiring government control and ownership?

And yet Republican candidates are saying they don’t want socialism while they quietly watch the Trump administration gobble up shares of private companies, snuggling up to the literal definition of socialism.

But perhaps it’s not full-on socialism. Benito Mussolini also championed what the Trump administration publicly touts as “public-private partnerships,” with the Italian dictator bringing corporations formally into the government with his Grand Council of Fascism. Mussolini brought the corporations into the government; Trump has brought the government into the corporations. But maybe we should learn the difference. The first one is the one Mussolini did, and the other one is the one the Chinese communists are doing.