Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
This Is Starting to Get Serious
As the saying goes: First things fall apart slowly, then all at once. I see more and more discussion about food shortages here on Ricochet. pResident Biden has made mention of it. Tucker has noted the uptick in accidents at food processing plants. California is restricting water for agriculture. Major sources of supply for fertilizer have been disrupted.
Independent journalist Michael Yon keeps banging his drum about PanFamWar (pandemic, famine, war). And the surging migration unchecked through the southern border from all over the world — estimated at 2 million since Biden took power — adds pressure on our food supply as well. In truth, regardless of the estimated “excess deaths” during the pandemic, depopulation did not occur at a rate to pace the decreases in food production capacity. Or so it is being suggested.
If true, what does the future look like? Scott Adams has a theory about “slow moving disasters”: If it is moving slowly enough, then humans do a pretty good job of adapting and/or solving the problem. This is why Adams, while professing to believe in man-enhanced climate change, is unconcerned whether we will create solutions in time to prevent the worse fears of climatistas from coming about. But there are two conditions that must be met: (1) the disaster must be slow moving, and (2) people must be alert to it.
It is not heartening that the default condition for the people in charge now is to manage scarcity rather than freeing up the people to pursue abundance. From energy policy, to monetary policy, to border policy, to foreign relations, to central planning, the Biden Administration and their allies are seemingly doing everything to make the food supply more fragile and less abundant. If undeterred things will get worse before they get better. Is this then a “slow moving disaster”?
If not, how is this going to play out? How much of our infrastructure and basic civilizational elements can operate without well-fed people, or people at all? Can the elite run it all? Are we facing a Soylent Green future?
As I write this I am sitting in a comfortable home in a beautiful place. A lifetime of working and saving have brought me to a very satisfying point where I might have been expected to have a decade or two (G-d willing) of good living, pursuing my interests and diversions, before having a serious discussion with the Grim Reaper or his nastier brother, The Debilitator. But with these people (I am tempted to say “clowns” but that doesn’t capture their combination of incompetence and malignity) in charge, my expectations are being severely challenged.
Are we all on board that our current course is leading to disaster? There is a lot of building going on in my neck of the woods. Unemployment is about as low as the working capability of my region permits. The boats speeding by on the lake by my house are still fueled, the fish are still there to be caught, the thrill of wind and waves remain. But when will the fuel supplies start to dry up, when will rationing begin and why? Just two years ago this was unimaginable.
Did we learn anything from the pandemic as to what workforce is truly essential to a functioning civilization? Or will food rationing decisions be arbitrary and capricious, with a thriving black market? And, if so, who is to be most advantaged — long time residents of this country or more recent arrivals from societies where barter, bargaining, and food uncertainty is already familiar?
I cannot attribute this quote (or probably more accurately a paraphrase): “The Civil War was fought over whether we were to be known as ‘these United States’ or ‘this United States’.” Similarly we are facing the question of the correct current formulation of the following: “The American Experiment is a triumph of the Enlightenment” or “The American Experiment was a triumph of the Enlightenment.”
Hard times are coming unless we gain an urgency about the hard work necessary to preserve the future we expected.
Published in General
You’ve obviously never read Mao or know any Chinese history.
Maybe the Chinese would load food onto ships while starving, but I’m not so sure that Americans would.
Also, that ignores the possibility/likelihood of taking back the property by Eminent Domain before it even comes to the point of skeletal California Libs putting all their food onto ships taking it elsewhere.
I worded that poorly. What I’m concerned about is the Chinese ownership of American businesses and farmland. :-)
You think China can buy farmland and take it to China so that Americans starve?
The possibilities are unfortunately endless.
Well, Joe Biden might believe it’s possible, but that’s Joe Biden.
There could also be a twist, which Joe Biden would never see in a million years. China could buy all this stuff at a premium price, like Japan did a few decades ago. And then their economy craters, like Japan’s did a few decades ago, and they have to sell it back to us at a huge discount.
Obviously not. All they have to do is buy enough Americans to operate the US as a Chinese colony, as they have done in Africa. It would be bloody, but it could definitely be done. Gun control will be step 2. Get a bunch of school massacres in one year and watch.
The eco-commies just saw – and celebrated – the victory of a 15 buck an hour minimum wage. Unfortunately, they had not insisted that the US economy that this wage hike descended upon should remain in a steady state.
So now you have parts of our workforce that will be making 3 or 4 dollars an hour more. Those who were getting food stamps or some help paying the incredibly expensive ObamaCare premiums will now not only be making enough to pay taxes, they will lose the bennies they recently had.
Meanwhile, that 15 bucks will buy 33% less gas than the 11 dollar an hour worker could purchase back in early 2020. A pound of hamburger has gone from $ 3.45 a lb to 6.40 a lb just over the past eight months.
No one has said, or will ever say, that any of the eco-commies understand math, logic or the workings of the bottom portion of the economy that most Americans deal with. Hopefully they can live off their feelings of vast superiority over the “common working class” individual, because they sure won’t be living off of a full plate.
As far as the coming food shortages, I suspect that 90% of Americans will believe Fauci or his replacement when he tells the public “No one needs more than 450 calories a day.” And then when we starve to death, that same “health official” will state “These people died of long c-o-v-i-d — a condition that would not have come into existence if 100% of Americans had agreed to roll up their sleeves.” !!!