The Hunger Games

Aug 16, 2024

Issue #184

Recently Kamala Harris was asked about inflation, which prompted her to offer up this word salad (please watch; it's short). It's like Michael Scott of The Office trying to explain something that he has no knowledge of. But fear not, Kam now has a plan to deal with this mysterious phenomenon, which she will announce today.

Fortunately, she and her economic advisors have determined the root cause of inflation. No, it's not the Federal Reserve conjuring up trillions of dollars out of thin air to buy U.S. Treasury bonds. It's corporate greed. And the solution, of course, is coercion and violence: price controls on food.

No, the fact that food companies have to compete with each other, have low profit margins, and have been having to pay a lot more for everything like everyone else is irrelevant. Instead, for some reason, all of the food companies decided to ruthlessly start gouging their customers at the same time in a lust for filthy lucre.

So if she becomes President (which I now think is very possible), and a consumer and a food producer agree to exchange some food at a price that is acceptable to both, Kamala will have men with guns step in and stop that trade from happening. Instead, the price will have to be significantly lower. So the greedy management of food companies won't be able to exploit their customers, who will be able to buy a lot of quality food for good prices, and everyone will be well-fed and live happily ever after thanks to the federal government's interference. The End.

As economist Thomas Sowell wrote, “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

This situation (excessive government spending leads to excessive government borrowing, which leads to massive debasement of the currency (especially a fiat currency), which leads to rapidly rising prices (which makes necessities increasingly unaffordable for many consumers), which leads to government price controls) has happened many times in many places during the last two millennia, so it is very easy to predict what will happen next.

Since food companies already have low profit margins (food isn't a commodity, but it's fairly close to it), if they can't increase their prices to keep up with rising expenses, they will first reduce the quality of their products. For example, if a product had been sweetened with honey, it will now be replaced with something like an artificial sweetener or high-fructose corn syrup (both of which are terrible for your health).

However, sooner rather than later, reducing the quality of the inputs won't be enough to compensate for rising input costs, and so these companies will become unprofitable. Depending on how much cash they have and their debt service (most publicly traded companies are loaded to the gills with an unprecedented amount of debt, thanks to the Fed keeping interest rates artificially low since 2008), they may be able to coast on fumes for a quarter or two before they'll have to cease operations.

Food will stop magically appearing in cities and everyone will start to get hangry. At this point, statist politicians will double down with more scapegoating, central planning and coercion, which will make things even worse. The federal government (and many state governments) will create all kinds of boards, agencies and departments and enlist an army of bureaucrats, inspectors and investigators to go around and try to prevent two parties from engaging in a mutually beneficial transaction.

As a result, black markets will appear, which will be controlled by criminal gangs, which will use violence to deal with competitors and sometimes sell counterfeit products.

Real hunger—unlike anything that current Americans have ever known—will reappear, and many people (mostly the sick and elderly) will begin to die from starvation. Those who survive will become increasingly desperate (and thus violent), sick, and mentally and psychologically unwell.

At this point, statist politicians will issue a mea culpa, admit that they were wrong and that socialism, central planning and coercion/violence don't work, and allow the free market to set prices for scarce goods and services, thus balancing supply and demand and ensuring a supply that is always available to the marginal buyer.

Ha-ha! Not. No, at this point, things will really start to go off the rails as True Believers like Tim Walz come up with some Very Good Ideas that should be implemented immediately and at scale, like moving most people (regardless of their knowledge and skills) to a collective farm, installing backyard steel furnaces, and waging a war on sparrows. Such insanity will proceed in a downward spiral, resulting in tyranny, poverty, starvation and genocide.

What's sick about all of this is not that statist politicians are merely misguided because they never took an Introduction to Economics class. No, instead, I strongly suspect that these people (and the puppeteers who control them) want to move the diet of the 99.9% non-elite towards the World Economic Forum food pyramid so that the global population can be reduced from 8.2 billion to less than 500 million, which would leave all of the steak and salmon for themselves.

These people are obsessed with getting rid of meat (especially from cows and chickens) and making food more unaffordable and unavailable. As the No Agenda Show podcast has been reporting, in recent months the federal government has been screwing around on American farms, trying to conjure up another Bird Flu hoax with their accomplices in the Legacy Media. Millions of animals have already been culled.

Hunger is a very powerful condition that has been used as a political weapon to great effect by tyrants such as Joseph Stalin. Starvation could be used to persuade people “up in the hills” to relocate to 15-Minute Cities where the government provided food.

When thinking of a title for this issue, “The Hunger Games” came to me. Almost everyone has heard of the dystopian trilogy, but since I've never read the books or seen the movies (I try to avoid whatever is very popular with the masses), I wasn't very familiar with it, so I looked it up. Per Wikipedia:

“The Hunger Games trilogy takes place in an unspecified future time, in the dystopian, post-apocalyptic nation of Panem, located in North America. The country consists of a wealthy Capitol city...surrounded by twelve (originally thirteen) poorer districts ruled by the Capitol. The Capitol is lavishly rich and technologically advanced, but the districts are in varying states of poverty. The trilogy's narrator and protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, lives in District 12, the poorest region of Panem, located in Appalachia, where people regularly die of starvation. As punishment for a past rebellion against the Capitol...in which District 13 was destroyed, one boy and one girl from each of the twelve remaining districts...are selected by lottery to compete in an annual pageant called the Hunger Games. The Games are a televised event in which the participants, called "tributes," are forced to fight to the death in a dangerous public arena. The lone victor and their home district are then rewarded with food, supplies, and riches. The purposes of the Hunger Games are to provide entertainment for the Capitol and to remind the districts of the Capitol's power and its lack of remorse or forgiveness for the failed rebellion of the current competitors' ancestors.”

Sound familiar? Is J.D. Vance the new Katniss?

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The Hunger Games

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