A Stitch in Haste

"We need a real world and not the world of economic theories."
--United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

I noted, several times, the unfortunate phenomenon of rising food commodity prices — especially the "ethanol connection" — long before it was fashionable.

By "fashionable," I mean:

--United Nations bureaucrats calling the situation a "silent tsunami."

--Hugo Chavez' silly little "Mini-me," Bolivian socialist (and drug kingpin) Evo Morales, using the crisis as an excuse to demand the worldwide abolition of all capitalism (including, no doubt, the marketplace of ideas).

--Bureaucrats at the Asian Development Bank calling for an end to ethanol subsidies.

--Paul Krugman lamenting that we are "running out of planet to exploit."

--All of the above failing to connect the dots:

Just over 1 billion people live on $1 a day, the benchmark of absolute poverty; 1.5 billion live on $1 to $2 a day. Bob Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, reckons that food inflation could push at least 100m people into poverty, wiping out all the gains the poorest billion have made during almost a decade of economic growth.

The problem of course is thinking of "all the gains the poorest billion have made" solely in terms of "economic growth." But the "absolutely poor" of the world also tend to be the "absolutely oppressed" of the world — the two populations are essentially identical. Show me a hyper-poor economy, and I'll show you either a Communist dictatorship, a military junta, or a mob-installed socialist "worker's paradise" where the state has made it simply impossible for most of its people (other than state-installed crony capitalists and other politically connected elites) to do any better than "$1 to $2 a day."

When rising food prices turn "$1 to $2 a day" into "death by starvation," perhaps the problem isn't the "food prices" part but rather the "$1 to $2 a day" part. And fixing that requires fixing (i.e., scrapping) anti-democratic and anti-capitalist regimes and rhetoric.

The United States could, by itself, feed the world. Add in Europe, Canada, Australia and all the other free or mostly free Western economies that have significant (i.e., excess) agricultural capacity, and the world is simply drowning in food (has everyone forgotten the "obesity epidemic"?). The problem is not that we are "running out of food" — the problem is that we are running out of capitalism — and we need to start producing more of it. A lot more.

It's quite simple really: Give a man a fish and he's fed for a day. Stop stealing his fish and he's fed for a lifetime.

(Via Concurring Opinions. More thoughts from Reason's Matt Welch.)