NYC Municipal Grocery Stores, the Rent Freeze, and Federal Equity Stakes: Hume's Knowledge Problem in 2026

A City Promised Groceries 30% Below Retail. Somebody Still Has to Decide 30% Below What.In July, New York City published a request for proposals asking qualified grocers to bid on operating one or more of five publicly funded, privately operated stores. The winning operator handles merchandising, sourcing, and a city-branded private label. A core basket sells at thirty percent below retail, reset once a month. The information session was August 5. Proposals are due at four o’clock on October 16. And the document identifies market data and observable evidence as possible inputs without fixing a benchmark or a formula, which means the number exists so far as a promise rather than as a method. That is not a gotcha about drafting. It is that somebody eventually has to sit down and decide what a typical retail price is in a city of eight and a half million people and more than a thousand grocery stores, and then decide it again a month later.This is the contemporary application episode for Week 12 of Self-Evident, and it takes Saturday’s Scottish argument into the ordinary business of getting and spending. Not whether a government that sets out to direct that business means well. Whether it can know what it would have to know.Three cases, in ascending order of how hard they are to correct. The Rent Guidelines Board voted seven to one on June 25 under Order 58 to set adjustments at zero percent for both one-year and two-year renewal leases beginning October 1, covering roughly a million rent-stabilized apartments. The board is not a mob; it is a technical body that publishes seven separate research documents, one of which produced commensurate adjustment figures running from 3.4 to 8.5 percent. It voted zero anyway, and there is no binding rule anywhere telling it which metric controls. One number has to cover a building in Brooklyn where every unit is stabilized and the boiler is forty years old and the building two blocks away with four stabilized units and a new roof, and it has to be chosen in an evening for a year that has not happened yet.Then the municipal grocery record, which is genuinely mixed and gets reported honestly here rather than as a talking point. St. Paul, Kansas, a town of about six hundred, has kept a city-owned supermarket running since 2013 and turned a small profit. Anybody who wants to say these always fail has to go through St. Paul first. But Erie, fifteen miles away, is the case that matters, because Erie did everything a careful town is supposed to do. It surveyed residents by mail and warned them the shortfall might land on their utility bills. It sent its clerk to St. Paul in 2019 to ask the people who had made it work. It ran the store for about three and a half years, leased it to a professional operator who runs rural groceries across two states, and the doors closed anyway. The diligence was real and it never answered the only question that mattered, which was whether that store on that street with those competitors would cover its own costs. The residents answered it instead, one trip at a time.And then the level where none of that applies. As of the end of July, the most complete public accounting of what the federal government owns counted $27.7 billion across thirty-nine announced deals involving direct ownership, and it is maintained by a think tank rather than by the government that owns the positions. Federal budget rules were built for grants and loans; they record an equity purchase as money out the door with very little machinery for recording what comes back. There is no consolidated, publicly marked-to-market ledger of the portfolio, no published portfolio-wide exit framework, and no rule for writing one that does not create the problem it was meant to prevent — a mechanical exit rule destroys value, a discretionary one invites the interference the rule existed to stop. A Senate committee has reported a bill with an entire subtitle on equity investments, and that subtitle is mostly oversight and deserves credit for being so, but it covers one Defense Department office while the largest position in the story sits at Commerce. Cloture on the motion to proceed failed fifty to forty-six on July 14 and the bill has not been taken up since.The episode does not let the libertarian side off. It concedes that we are better at explaining why a store will fail than at explaining why Hunts Point looks the way it does after decades of zoning, licensing, and tax treatment that we wrote well about and never campaigned on. It concedes that certainty about outcomes is one of the things the knowledge argument denies to everybody in the room, including the person making it. It concedes the national security objection wins its own domain outright. And it draws the distinction the whole hour turns on: ending a practice and directing an economy require different knowledge. To end a practice you have to know it is wrong. You do not have to know what will replace it. Abolition is not central planning.The question this program keeps asking: did this leave us more free, or more governed?Facts on the litigation, the federal portfolio, and the pending defense authorization are stated as of the recording date. All three were moving when this was recorded and may have moved since.⏱️ CHAPTERS00:00 NYC’s Request for Proposals for Publicly Funded Groceries03:19 Welcome to Episode 12B: Self-Evident04:45 David Hume’s Argument on Undesigned Institutions05:57 The NYC Rent Guidelines Board and Price Fixing12:36 Analyzing the NYC Groceries Program15:33 The Mixed History of Municipal Grocery Stores25:49 The Federal Government’s Growing Equity Portfolio29:56 The Dilemma of Exiting Federal Ownership Stakes33:25 Sovereign Wealth Funds and Durable Machinery39:04 Local Experiments vs. Unbounded Federal Programs41:26 Addressing Three Objections to the Knowledge Argument47:53 The Liberty Test: Are We More Free or More Governed?55:21 Looking Ahead: Artificial Intelligence and Adam Smith📚 COMPANION ARTICLEArticle 12 of 22, “The Scottish Alternative — The Scottish Enlightenment, Part I: Foundations,” with the Ferguson epigraph, Hume’s three illustrations of convention, the artificial-but-not-arbitrary passage, and the Self-Reflection Prompts: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-scottish-alternative-the-scottish-enlightenment-part-i-foundations#nycgroceries #rentfreeze #knowledgeproblem #industrialpolicy #sovereignwealthfund #federalism #libertarian #austrianeconomics #roadto1776 #consequentialactions This is a public episode. 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