We almost spilled our Starbucks Mocha on our gym shorts the other morning when we saw that New York City’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has announced 50 regulatory reforms that “will reduce the paperwork and bureaucratic burden facing the city’s roughly 180,000 small businesses.”

One of these is allowing shops to sell fruit and flowers in front of the store on the sidewalk.  (Not earth shattering stuff, but, hey, it’s a start!)

Here is Mamdani sounding like Steve Forbes in selling the plan:

“You cannot tell the story of New York without our small businesses, and yet our city has often made it too hard for them to open their doors and keep them open. The owners tell us the same thing again and again. What wears them down is not simply the cost of any one fee, it is the paperwork and the inconsistency they face when dealing with their own government.”

Does that include the “uncertainty” from the city spending tens of millions  to operate grocery stores and compete with the multiple hundreds of small business grocery stores already operating in the city?

Just wondering.