[Here is a true story:
When immigration enforcement ramped up in Minneapolis earlier this year, communist owner Dylan Alverson rebranded the restaurant as "Post Modern Times." He took prices off the menu and declared he would feed anyone who walked in the door, whether they could pay or not. For six months, the restaurant operated as a pay-what-you-can (or pay-nothing-at-all) sanctuary in Minneapolis. But as it turns out, people are greedy, and the comrade who pays $10 for a hipster sandwich starts wondering why they are shelling out $10 while someone else pays $1, and the comrade who pays $1 is wondering why others are getting the sandwich for free.
And so, the aptly named Post Modern Times has come to a predictable end. The owner declared bankruptcy.]
"To each according to his needs, from each according to his ability."
It ends in bankruptcy every time!
The essential moral is not “people are greedy.” It is: need is not a claim to the product of another man’s effort—and good intentions are not a substitute for economics or morality.
From an Objectivist perspective (Rand/Peikoff), what this story illustrates is a collision with facts:
1) The inescapable fact: values must be produced
A restaurant is not a wishing well. It is a production process: someone must buy ingredients, maintain equipment, schedule labor, manage risk, and earn enough to continue. When you remove prices (i.e., remove a rational method of exchange), you do not remove costs—you merely conceal them and shift them.
Even by the sympathetic coverage, the cafe tried a months-long pay-what-you-can model and later brought prices back, and it is now planning to close. (startribune.com)
That sequence—abolish prices → disorder/unsustainability → partial retreat → closure—is the pattern of evasion meeting reality.
2) “To each according to his need” is a moral blank check for looting
Rand’s moral principle is: no man may initiate physical force—and in economics, the practical meaning of that is: no one may claim a right to unearned wealth.
The slogan “to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability” treats need as a moral title deed. But “need” is not a moral credential; it is a problem to be solved—primarily by the person who has it, using his mind, effort, and trade.
A pay-what-you-can restaurant can exist as charity (a voluntary gift by the owner and donors), but it is not “socialism working.” It is altruism temporarily subsidized.
3) Prices are not “capitalist cruelty”—they are information and justice
Economically (and this aligns with Reisman’s analysis), prices coordinate production and consumption: they ration scarce goods without violence and signal where resources should go. When you remove prices, you replace a rational regulator with whim, pressure, and ultimately collapse (or the return of prices under another name).
Notice: the story itself implies the unavoidable incentive conflict—paying customers resent subsidizing nonpayers, donors fatigue, and the business can’t plan. That isn’t a moral flaw in “human nature.” It’s what happens when you attempt to run production on the premise of sacrifice.
4) The deeper lesson: socialism is not “sharing”—it’s anti-mind
Rand’s root objection to socialism is not first economic, but moral and epistemological: it penalizes the producer for producing and elevates claims detached from reality (“need,” “social justice,” “the cause”) above the facts of production.
A restaurant is a miniature demonstration: you cannot consume what you do not produce, and you cannot sustain production by treating the producer as a sacrificial animal.
So what’s the moral, stated cleanly?
Reality is not optional.
If you want a business, you must operate by trade, property, prices, and profit—i.e., by voluntary exchange and objective feedback. If you want charity, call it charity—and accept that it depends on surplus produced elsewhere.
If you tell me what you want to extract from this—economic lesson, moral lesson, or political lesson—I can sharpen it into a single principle (and also separate what’s actually known from what’s editorializing in the write-up).
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