Posted on 04/21/2008 9:14:11 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
Josh Gerstein, a reporter for The New York Sun, has taken scare journalism to a new low. He reports that food rationing is now occurring in the United States. It happens insidiously as we sleep. He even accuses us of hoarding food when we shop at Costco.
Gerstein samples the panic and desperation that stampedes voraciously through the panic-stricken masses of Mountain View, California.
At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.
"Where's the rice?" an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. "You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous."
Not to be outdone, survivalists have dusted off the tin-foil hats and began auditioning as harbingers of Modern Man’s inevitable doom. It seems that a certain congressman from The Great State of Texas shut down Ye Olde Survival Letter a few issues too soon. We’ll all still make it through, others have picked up the fallen flag.
"It's sporadic. It's not every store, but it's becoming more commonplace," the editor of SurvivalBlog.com, James Rawles, said. "The number of reports I've been getting from readers who have seen signs posted with limits has increased almost exponentially, I'd say in the last three to five weeks."
Of course his reports have increased exponentially; Mr. Rawls has gotten into the newspapers. People are unable to report data points to an agglomerating activity that they do not know exists. Mr. Rawls had to get blog hits from those individuals before he could receive said shortage reports. I’m quite sure reports of Alar Poisoning spiked like the graph of a Dirac Delta Function after Meryl Streep took up the misleading cause.
Such trends normally hold true in the case of blatantly disingenuous Malthusian hype. The modeling trends of Malthus had us all dead decades before the Club of Rome could threaten us once more with a modeled glide path to human extinction. Their pseudo-scientific report “Limits to Growth” is probably mandatory reading before anyone authors a section of the final briefings for an IPCC iteration.
A pessimistic scenario, even of Malthusian Catastrophe proportions, can serve a decision-making organization well. It’s just that most people who write for newspapers don’t report them properly. The Malthusian Case should be on the fringe of a probability distribution. It represents what could happen if everything that could go wrong left on vacation to Hell in a cute, little hand-basket.
Gerstein reports this worst case as if it was typical of all America and occurring on daily basis. This smacks of deliberate hype and dishonesty. Reporting that Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson tells the truth about a certain fight, on a certain, given night. A post fight report that Douglas could have whipped Tyson like a chump 99 times out of 100, probably does rough injustice to the truth.
Gerstein’s latest effort displays appalling economic ignorance. I’ve lived under food rationing every single time I’ve gone to a grocery store. I have a budget line. That budget line gets confronted by a price. That budget line divided by the stated price of what I would like to munch on tells me how large of a ration of a given food product I can afford.
Costco faces the same uncertainties, even in the lush environs of Mountain View, California. They would like to stock enough basmati to feed an army of customers in return for adequate remuneration. At the present wholesale price, Costco does not have an infinite budget to fill its entire outstanding order quantity.
Hence, they ration out how many bags of the stuff I can walk into the warehouse and buy out of their high regard for the ten basmati-munchers in line behind me at the checkout counter. This does not constitute the end of life as we know it. Food remains available in modern America to the extent that obesity contributes to a majority of the major chronic health problems that prevail in our nation’s general population.
As for the food-hoarding; I’ve done that ever since I bought my Costco Card. I didn’t sign up for that deal to lose the $50 I shelled out to become a member. If I go to Safeway instead, see packages of processed pasta thingy on sale for $10 for 10 packages, I will habitually get two or three more of them than my family needs for subsistence. I’m hoarding and anyone on SurvivalBlog.com that reads this blog needs to enter another report. I even scare myself sometimes.
In fairness to the earnest and frightened Josh Gerstein, the prices have gotten too high at Costco, Safeway and every other place we go to buy groceries. The everyday rationing mechanism called the supply and demand equilibrium demands more of my wife and I than either of us appreciates. This has been exacerbated by grotesquely bad agricultural and energy legislation in both Dennis Hastert’s and Nancy Pelosi’s poorly executed stewardships over the House of Representatives.
We don’t pay more for our groceries because of any apocalypse. We pay a premium for electing morons to our highest offices. Yet even after bungling Hurricane Katrina’s impact and aftermath; Mayor Nagin has no real problem defending his incumbency. This doesn’t mean we face a disaster. Our electorate just keeps getting the government it deserves; good and hard.
Will US harvests be large enough to fill this global demand? Is the price function going to bring out more supply, as one would expect it to?
If so, this ought to make a dent in our trade deficit. The first thing in a long time that has had the potential to do so.
Congressional morons BUMP!
Here in Iowa, it seems that farmers will grow more soybeans and LESS corn. Anticipated return on investment drives production.
Tortilla trees?
If the U.S. had set out to reduce its trade deficit, and get back some of the money its sending to OPEC for oil — a great strategy would be to burn up the food surplus. To do so at the urging of global warming alarmists would be a brilliant stroke.
That could work for a while until someone breaks cartel.
This is just another Chicken Little scare.
It’s actually a lot like the toilet paper shortage in the mid-70s, when we had gasoline rationing. Johnny Carson jokingly stated, on his late night show, that there was a shortage of toilet paper. There wasn’t, but that didn’t matter, hoarders flocked to the stores and in 2 or 3 days, no toilet paper on any of the store shelves. Since this phenomenon fed on itself, stores couldn’t keep toilet paper on the shelves for the next 2 or 3 months.
Our economic system works on a small supply buffer, there are no provisions for massive swarms of people hoarding stuff.
And they don't even know its crap. You can show them the facts. You can provide urls and factual data, the bottom line for CA Democrats?
"HOW DARE YOU TRY TO STOP ME FROM ENJOYING SUCH AGONY WHETHER FALSE OR TRUE! how dare YOU!
Reporters like this rube are merely positing a daily dose of crap in order to satisfy the average liberal's addiction to ingesting mental crap.
It's the same thing with Obama voters - Calamity Junkies. "We know it's going to be very bad because it will hurt so good!"
Most Americans, including me, are fat. This guy is nuts.
It’s a cheap and disingenuous road to power.
Journalists don’t study economics. They picked up enough from their deep and loving study of marxism.
Our economic system works on a small supply buffer, there are no provisions for massive swarms of people hoarding stuff.
Sort of
In distribution the system is called inventory turns.
The system gets “fooled” once. The next cycle’s projection will spike up. If the demand recedes as rapidly as it went up, then the system gets “fooled” twice. Then prices get dirt cheap.
Here in Toronto we have regular “food shortages” — caused, as I discover after American-style prodding, by the fact that most of the people doing the ordering don’t keep proper records and have no idea how much they need for which customers, at what time. I have actually had a person in the customer service section at Zellers tell me that they get 2 or 3 trucks a day and they have no idea what’s on them until they are unloaded.
In Toronto you buy what they have, not what you want. Or you go to the States and buy what you want.
This reporter is an idiot. He and the Costco customers he interviewed have no comprehension how Costco, BJ, or Sams conducts Supply Chain Management (SCM). Whaaa, I can’t buy grass seed in the Winter at those stores and where are the snow skies in the Summer? Merchandise runs in cycles in those big boxes. If you see something you want you need to buy it now, because it may not be there until the cycle comes around again. That’s how they keep the prices down. Just ask Kramer when he was buying beans for the horse.
Thanks for the laugh.....that was my thought as I’ve been reading about “food shortages.” Like....some people could USE a food shortage!!!
I recall this was once called the road to hell.
I heard somewhere that worldwide food production capacity could feed 29 Billion people if we needed to. I don’t see any shortages any time soon so long as the distribution infrastructure holds up.
I saw this on Drudge today. I’m glad this guy is calling out the journalist on this nonsense. Because a a couple people can’t buy two bags of rice, that translates to “Food Rationing in the US”? What hyperbolic nonsense. You know, the internet is a great thing, but its really giving the calamity junkies more fuel than they need of late.
The reason you can't find the rice in Cosco is that many Asian growers had a horrible year. They supply a lot of the rice that US consumers want, and their home countries have banned exports.
“”HOW DARE YOU TRY TO STOP ME FROM ENJOYING SUCH AGONY WHETHER FALSE OR TRUE! how dare YOU!”
That’s precisely why they try to grab the ass of life!
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