Why There's a Food Shortage; Or, All Mafia Must Die!

As rationing has become the best case scenario in the food markets (rioting being the worst case scenario), we have to wonder if there really is starting to be a shortage of food in the world. And if so, why?

I think we're seeing food shortages for these reasons:

1.  The food markets are totally manipulated and controlled by the developed world's governments and their cronies. The UN and all these hurtful food-aid programs that have continually undermined any chance for a self-sustaining, virtuous farming and food industry in places like the entire continent of Africa and all of Lebanon, Palestine, etc.  Meanwhile, farmers in developed worlds are paid billions to grow certain crops, billions to not grow anything at all sometimes, billions to subsidize their lifestyles...

But again, the farmers in Africa?  Oh, my bad, I didn't mean to float an oxymoron -- there's practically no such thing as an African farmer, as we don't let farmers in Africa develop any markets because the governments in the developed world also use your money to buy up billions of the crops that do get grown in the developed world to send as "aid" to the developing world, and the vicious cycle continues.  The only reason these hurtful, unproductive and outright evil policies exist is because technology and excess capital had enabled the developed world to overproduce for itself, making food costs in consequential to the "average" developed world citizen.  That game has officially ended, in large part because of the next point below...

2.  The Fed's quickly accelerated the pace at which it's destroyed the value of the dollar in the last year or so.  I explained it this way to the students in the macro econ class I taught at UNM a couple weeks ago:  Let's say there's one bottle of water and one dollar bill in the entire economy.  I give you the dollar bill and you give me the water.  Now I print another dollar bill (because, say, I've got a "credit crisis" or some BS like that). Can I give you the dollar bill for another bottle of water?  No!  Because you can create new dollars out of thin air but you can't create new bottles of water without actual productivity.  So how much is a dollar worth after I've printed two?  A dollar's suddenly worth half a bottle of water instead of a whole bottle of water.

Let's put this into the real world now.  Let's say you're a grandma at home and you've lived cautiously your whole life and you own your home outright and you've got a fixed income that you're living on.  Suddenly, your dollar's worth half a bag of rice instead of being worth a whole bag of rice because the Fed's printing money for everybody who's speculated on a mortgage, levered up on their credit cards, or works for a bank, especially an investment bank.

It's largely this line of thinking that has me constantly calling the Democrats, Republicans and Fedheads in charge a bunch of thieves for all the ways their printing new dollars out of thin air.  And it's very much their recent actions that are causing the skyrocketing prices, and therefore a perceived "shortage" of food out there.  There's more of a glut of dollars than a shortage of food in some ways, see?

3.  There's an ever-growing number of citizens on this planet gaining access to excess capital and the wonders that happen when private property laws are at least somewhat recognized.  There were 1.5 billion people on the Internet a couple years ago.  Now there's 1.7 billion.  That's 200 million more people feeling safe enough and nourished enough to log onto MySpace, Bidu and Google.  Thomas Malthus, the classic economist argued that there's a natural limit to the number of people our Earth can support.  Technology and constant improvements to productivity has made his theories laughable for centuries.  I expect that to continue though certainly there will be counter cycles along the next few centuries just as their has been in the past. More to the point, let's hope Malthus continues looking like the historical idiot he always has because that means we will, over time, actually start feeding and communicating with the 4.3 billion citizens of the world that still don't feel safe enough and nourished enough to log onto the Net too.

4.  Ethanol.  Farmers get billions of your taxdollars to grow food for an energy program that actually requires much more energy to create the energy in the program than any scientist can seemingly explain that the energy program might someday produce.  It's called cronyism and it's a SCAM!  Ethanol is a scam.

5.  You're grandma again, and you're seeing the value of what you can spend disappear before your eyes every week, every month, every gas tank fill, every utility bill, etc.  Might you not start hoarding as much as you can, since, as noted in point #2 above, rice holds its value in an era of created money?

The good news, IMHO, is that it's likely most of this stuff will simply play itself out over the next few months and quarters as the forces of Revolutionomics carry through here once again.  Revolutionomics is my theory that all power dissipates from the center to the edge over time.  All these central controls and scams by the Democrats, Republicans and their cronies in power will be undermined by the black markets for food until the very framework of any attempts to control our world's food supply will fail.

Oil's got the evil OPEC mafia.  Food's got the evil FooPec mafia of its own too, huh?

All mafia must die!

PS.  We're gonna go off on this the food shortage topic in tonight's Happy Hour, btw, so stay tuned.  Let's get to the bottom of this.