“You should let the marketplace decide,” Bloomberg asserts, regarding Wal-Mart; sound familiar?

From yesterday's New York Times, headlined Wal-Mart Skips Council Hearing as Impact of Stores Is Assailed:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has said that New York should be open to any legal business that wants to come here, was asked by a reporter on Thursday about the hearing and if it was in the city’s best interest to let Wal-Mart set up shop.

“You should let the marketplace decide,” he said. “Anybody who has tried to manage the marketplace, it has not turned out very well. I think the Soviet Union is as good an example as you’d ever need of that.”

Bloomberg has similarly suggested that the market for sports teams is a free market, which, of course, it's not. It's a cartel, with limited supply.

And that leads localities to offer subsidies and other support to encourage them, such as an inside track on valuable public property like development rights to a railyard.

That's why Bloomberg’s identification with the developer, nearly 18 months before the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s belated RFP for its Vanderbilt Yard, was clear in this verbal slip: "Then, we’ve got to find a find a ways--Bruce Ratner’s got to find a ways--to build this complex in Brooklyn."