I always find it surprising that beautiful, caring, socialist-inspired ideas never seem to work.
Communes…they sound so wonderful, don’t they?
Well, all right, they sound like a version of hell where you have to live around a bunch of Bernie Sanderses, but you get the idea. The idea has a certain appeal to many people, and you would expect that socially-minded people could find a way to make their little slice of heaven work, right?
They never, ever do. They always crash and burn. Because they are built on a mistaken understanding of human nature.
So if closed communes don’t work, what happens when some socialist-minded activist tries to implement his ideas, hoping that everybody will join him once they realize how wonderful they are?
The collapse is even more rapid. Let me introduce Minneapolis’ own Post Modern Times, a restaurant that took a stand during Operation Metro Surge by removing prices from the menu and implementing a “pay what you can” model. Somehow they thought this was a stunning and brave move to fight back against ICE.
Already that tells you all you need to know about their reasoning ability. I can’t see the connection. But then again, I am a dirty capitalist pig, so you wouldn’t expect me to.
The Post Modern Times took prices off the menu. Neighbors say they paid a price. https://t.co/uvvGrpg9UT
— The Minnesota Star Tribune (@StarTribune) July 25, 2026
Originally, they promised to follow this policy until Metro Surge ended, but in March they proudly announced they would continue it indefinitely.
Shockingly, it has been a total disaster for everyone involved, except for those who dined and dashed with permission. Many of whom were, of course, homeless drug addicts who spent their days harassing neighbors.
It was a feel-good story in the bleakest days of the ICE surge and as news spread on social media, a reported half-million dollars in donations poured in. Enough money for owner Dylan Alverson to keep running his restaurant on donations and goodwill.
But donations ran low, and so did neighborhood goodwill.
Alverson announced Friday that the restaurant is closing for a few weeks, starting Sunday, while he hammers out a new business model. One that can still feed someone in need, without crowding out paying customers.
“We have served over 30,000 meals with over 2,000 donations,” the restaurant said in a social media post. “We feel like an over hard egg on the sidewalk without a fork or hot sauce. We knew this wasn’t going to be easy and we have exhausted ourselves, our winter’s donations, our building’s capacity, and at times our neighborhood.”
If you measure success or failure by the metric of “did meals get served,” then the experiment was a great success. If you use any other metric, it was a glaring failure.
Outside the restaurant walls, neighbors told a different story. They talked about overdoses on the sidewalk. Used syringes in the alley. Human feces in their yards. Thefts. Fights. Crowds of people lingering on the corner for hours on end, six days a week.
“I’ve never felt unsafe on my property or in the neighborhood,” said Jane. Like many who live near the restaurant, she feared for her safety if her name appeared in this story.
“It’s a family neighborhood,” she added. “I could go for walks late at night and people would be out with their kids. Now, with the decision that’s been made by Modern Times, for the first time I don’t feel safe.”
Post Modern Times was widely praised in the media when it began its experiment, but any sane person could have predicted (and many did) that it was a disaster waiting to happen.
“There are a lot of us who really wanted to give this a chance,” said Jane, who has experienced homelessness herself. But she’s a survivor of domestic violence who now navigates catcalls on her walk home. She found a naked man sleeping in her yard one day. Her daughter no longer wants to play outside.
Outside the restaurant on Wednesday, she said, crowds gathered, sparking loud arguments between customers and, then, between neighbors and staff. Post Modern closed in the middle of the day. The crowd, Alverson said, was bigger than the kitchen could handle. Spooked by escalating tensions in a city that has seen two mass shootings in the past week, Jane and her daughter slept in the basement that night.
There is lots of talk about suicidal empathy for good reason. Although, to be fair, the empathy is suicidal at least partly because it only applies to people who are deemed to be high enough on the intersectional ladder to be worth thinking about. There certainly was no empathy directed at the people who lived in the neighborhood and whose lives were turned upside down.
It’s easy to look at the failure of Post Modern Times, which is facing financial trouble in addition to its strained relationship with its neighbors, and joke at the expense of the idiots who did this to themselves.
But that ignores the serious damage they have done to others. In trying to help one group of people, they have made the lives of countless others much worse. As welcome as one more meal is to the homeless drug addict who gets a free meal, it won’t change their life in any substantial way. It just keeps them nourished enough to take another hit of fentanyl until their luck runs out and the overdose that kills them isn’t reversed by Narcan.
The people whose lives are changed the most are the neighbors who see their homes become prisons, and who are afraid to take a walk, or who have to clean up the human waste deposited on their lawns.
That’s no joke.
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