Sigh

“When this item is in shortage, treat it as not in shortage”. Yeah, that always works well.

He can argue until he is blue in the face but it won’t change reality.

“treated as public goods in a crisis”

He’s Humpty Dumpty, defining words to mean what he wants them to mean. His definition of “public good” is “Has a Fat Controller in charge of rationing it out”.

Something is a public good, or not. It’s non-rivalrous. If I have it and give it to you, I still have it. About the only thing I can think of where this is true, is information.

It doesn’t change from non-rivalrous to rivalrous because you want it to.

‘Here I go again on my own
Going down the only road I’ve ever known
Like a drifter (grifter perhaps more apt) I was born to walk alone..’

We have a coming physical supply crisis, and no established framework to deal with it. This crisis is as serious as COVID, and in many ways, I think it might be worse. COVID was manageable through vaccines, just as the 2008 global financial crisis was manageable through public spending, but this crisis involves physical shortage of the things our economy needs to function, and that is not going to be so easy to overcome.

The consequences will fall hardest on those least able to absorb this shock. Those on the living wage are already priced out of essential items, and that reality is not a neutral position. It is a political choice, and it was that politics that I heard on this programme.

So assuming this is true what is the practical solution? I haven’t read the whole thing yet but I am very intrigued as to how it will work. I think the one thing we can identify straight off is it will involve a high profile role for him.

A supermarket representative said I was exaggerating the crisis to come, and competition would solve the problem.

A farmer was even more simple. He said, “Let the markets rip”.

Both reflect a worldview in which markets self-correct, and people adjust, except they can’t if they don’t have the money to do so.

The man from the supermarket will still be able to afford his food and his petrol. So will the farmer. But they cannot imagine what it is going to be like for those who will be unable to do so. That is not, though, a lack of imagination. It is indifference to others, in my opinion.

So we are talking about what percentage of the population? How will the cutoff be determined? By him?

And if we let markets rip, people will die. I said that very plainly on air on the BBC, and I’m not sure that went down so well, but people died during the COVID crisis because the government failed to intervene early enough, and people already die in this country of the cold; around 25,000 people a year are thought to do so because pensions are too low. And a crisis of food and fuel this winter, and the two are likely to go together, could produce something far worse. My claim was not an exaggeration; it was a straightforward observation based upon the evidence of what is likely to happen.

Markets will not prevent these deaths when people cannot pay market prices for either food or energy, and that was the point that I was making on air.

But in North Korea, which has one of the most extensive state planning networks in the world, people die of starvation all the time. It’s an annual occurence. So giving the state control of things is in no way a guarantee of counteracting the risk. OF course I am sure with someone with Murphy’s extensive understanding of logistics we’d fare better than the denizens of Pyongyang. Anyone writes in the comments the bridge will be available on Ebay.

Also COVID deaths were dwarfed by those caused by the interventions. Hundreds of millions were killed by the consequences and dislocations entailed by lockdowns and by experimental vaccines. The deaths are still occurring.

Two of my arguments hit home in that discussion, and they are worth restating. The first was a very simple slogan. I said, we need to prioritise ‘food, not finance’. That I think is important. We do need to talk about food. We need to ignore the finance because. At the end of the day, people can’t eat finance. People do need food. Let’s get the Maslow hierarchy of needs right here, and we have to meet the essential needs of the UK population if we are going to avoid a crisis.

Absolutely agree here – let’s reduce the burden on imports, remove the DEI and Net Zero requirements for food producers, ignore anything related to LGBTQIA or various other bits of Red tape. Cut Fuel Duty. I’m game for that.

My second observation was that a mother who cannot feed her children is always one of the angriest people on earth. That happened to resonate with another caller into the programme, who was a mother, who was concerned about this very issue. But I didn’t make the observation up to suit her. It was something I first thought of in 2008. And I realised then that I was the parent of young children, and if I was not going to be able to feed them, I was going to be very angry. This is my point. We need to manage that anger because we cannot afford civil unrest.

We already have massive civil unrest caused by the current regime, the worst in human history. Food shortages will simply amplify existing dissent against this government which is the embodiment of pure evil – and the regime itself knows this. Hence it’s desperation to prevent another election, possibly ever.

We have got free market dogmatists who are going to fight any reasonable response to this crisis. They are already making a choice about who they think should bear the cost of what is going to happen, and their choice is to let it fall on those who cannot afford to pay.

The words ‘communist’, ‘statist’ and ‘socialist’ are already being used to dismiss any intervention of the sort I was talking about, like rationing, price controls and market support. But I was not making a party political argument.

But the solutions are still absurd. If this was World War 2 – which it isn’t you might be able to make the kind of intervention happen but as long as people continue to arrive unimpeded with no right to be here and their needs are prioritized over the indigenous population (a policy of which you wholly approve) then the public will to obey such structures will necessary be limited, and there are only so many police available to deploy to ensure compliance.

I was arguing that people need food, heat, and fuel to stay alive. Everything else is incidental after that, and it seems that those who are market dogmatists just do not care about that point. Callous indifference, dressed up as an economic principle, is not an answer to this crisis.

And what all this means is clear. And that is why I’m raising these issues now, time and again, whenever I get the opportunity to do so. This crisis is coming, and the resistance to dealing with it has already formed. Free-market dogma is the ideology of that resistance, and it must be challenged. The alternative to intervention is not stability; it will be disorder, and we need to resist that, and the draconian response it will create from our government, which has the powers to intervene now in ways that I think are deeply antisocial in themselves.

So as with any adherent of the Zack Polanski creed, my objection is perhaps practical. Will we be sending people with warrants into houses suspected of hoarding things? How will the rationing be organized? What is to stop (As they already do with housing) Muslims simply doling out food to their co-religionists? Are you going to censure the Hamas supporters who smash up alcohol as ‘not required’ – who will oversee this? You have the least competent government in British history. One with the ‘Reverse midas touch’ – and yet you want to put them in charge of an operation whose staggering logistical complexity would tax even the most experienced and capable logisticians in the world? Panglossian doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Food, energy, and fuel must be treated as public goods in a crisis and not as market commodities.

We need to prepare for this argument about how to respond to this crisis because it is the argument that will define what happens next in our society. Do we want to get through the coming crisis, or do we want to descend into mayhem, with a lot of casualties on the way?
That is the choice that we have available to us? I think we must take action to prevent ourselves from descending into mayhem

I think actually the aim is laudable but for me the horse has bolted. Decades of unbridled migration mean the social fabric has frayed to such a degree that I think serious disturbances should the scenario outlined come to pass are inevitable. What that leads to noone knows. While a comparison is absurd given the relative strength of the two groups, I fear the Hard Left’s response will mirror that of the SS in Bohemia- Moravia during the Second World War. Knowing they were isolated and cut off from fleeing West they doubled down and simply tried to inflict as much damage as possible. Any Green party or Labour supporter is of a similar level of evil and I can envisage much the same attempt;.

Face it, the language drift for ‘public goods’ now means ‘stuff that should be provided by the State’. Not the technical definition. The ship has sailed on that one

My pet hate for this type of thing is ‘the exception proves the rule’.