http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/07/life-in-the-post-food-surplus-world.html
Oh my God it hurts my head to read that stuff. How can educated journalists who comment on economic issues have such mind-numbing ignorance of basic economics?? One word: Switzerland. Good god, how obvious can it be? Just do what you’re good at and trade for what you need. It is true that supply issues just might be a problem in the future. That’s what food speculators are for. They don’t buy food so they can eat it. They buy food to store in the belief that prices will be higher in the future than in the present. Food speculation permits the economical buffering of food demand against food supply. In essence, food speculators are the insurance against drought and famine.
I guess the UN WFP and PBS types yearn for the days when 80% of the productive workforce was agricultural - back when things like hand-drawn plows and scythes were state of the art.
Clayton -
Hey Clayton, at least we didn’t suffer from alienation back then, in the Marxist sense. Gosh, things were so much better in the romanticized past.
“… food inflation in this era of rapid economic and population growth …”
It’s sickening how they try to blame rising food prices on growing population. It is true that food prices can increase temporarily due to an increase in the birth rate. However, prices cannot remain elevated long as the new population grows to adulthood and becomes productive. Furthermore, it has to be asked what the economic conditions were that led to an increase in the birth rate to begin with… population growth follows economic growth, not the other way around. I’m tired of these colonialists constantly pumping the old myths that poverty begets population growth and population growth begets high prices which again beget poverty and yet more population growth (the vicious circle that Africans are supposedly caught in).
Stop printing money and enslaving people with it. And as long as you’re getting away with it, at least have the class not to blame the victim, for goodness sake! It’s not like you’re not already richer than God… you should be able to afford to have some goddamn class! Take a refresher course at a finishing school if you have to!
Clayton -