Connect with us

Brownstone Institute

Grocery Rationing within Four Years

Published

11 minute read

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A. Tucker Jeffrey A. Tucker  

There is a lack of public comment and debate about Kamala Harris’s call for price controls on groceries and rents, the most stunning and frightening policy proposal made in my lifetime.

Immediately, of course, people will reply that she is not for price controls as such. It is only a limit on “gouging” (which she variously calls “gauging”) on grocery prices. As for rents, it’s only for larger-scale corporations with many units.

This is nonsense. If there really are national price-gouging police running around, every single seller of groceries, from small convenience stores to farmers’ markets to chain stores, will be vulnerable. No one wants the investigation so they will comply with de facto controls. No one knows for sure what gouging is.

Don Boudreaux is correct: “A government that threatens to punish merchants for selling at nominal prices higher than deemed appropriate by government clearly intends to control prices. It’s no surprise, therefore, that economists routinely  analyze prohibitions against so-called ‘price gouging’ using exactly the same tools they use to analyze other forms of price controls.”

As for rental units, the only result will be fewer amenities, new charges, new fees for what used to be free, less service, and a dramatically reduced incentive to build new units. That will only lead to a pretext for more subsidies, more public housing, and more government provision generally. We have experience with that and it is not good.

The next step is nationalizing housing and rationing of groceries because there will be ever fewer available.

The more the betting odds favor Kamala, the stronger the incentive to raise prices as high as possible now in anticipation of price controls come next year. That will provide even more seeming evidence for the need for more controls and a genuine crackdown.

Price controls lead to shortages of anything they touch, especially in inflationary times. With the Federal Reserve seemingly on the verge of cutting rates for no good reason – rates are very low in real terms by any historical standard – we might see wave two of inflation later next year.

Stay Informed with Brownstone Institute

Here are real interest rates historically considered as they stand. Do you see a case here for lowering them?

Next time, however, merchants will not be in a position to respond rationally. Instead, they will confront federal price investigators and prosecutors.

Kamala is wrong that this will be the “first-ever” ban on price gouging. We had that in World War II, along with rationing tickets on meat, animal fats, foil, sugar, flour, foil, coffee, and more. It was a time of extreme austerity, and people put up with it because they believed it was saving resources for the war effort. It was enforced the same as we saw with covid lockdowns: a huge network enlisting state and local institutions, media, and private zealots ready to rat out the rebels.

Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8875 on August 28, 1941. It claimed broad powers to manage all production and consumption in the US. On January 30, 1942, the Emergency Price Control Act granted the Office of Price Administration (OPA) the authority to set price limits and ration food and other commodities. Products were added as shortages intensified.

And yes, all of this was heavily enforced.

In case you are doing the math, that’s a $200,000 fine today for noncompliance. In other words, this was very serious and highly coercive.

Technology limited enforcement, however, and black markets sprung up everywhere. The so-called Meatleggers were the most famous and most demonized by government propaganda.

In a nation with more agriculture in demographic proximity, people relied on local farmers and various methods of bartering goods and services.

Years went by and somehow people got through it but production for civilian purposes came to a near standstill. The GDP for the period looked like growth but the reality was a continuation and intensification of the Great Depression that began more than a decade earlier.

There are fewer people alive now that recall these days but I’ve known some. They adopted habits of extreme conservation. I once had a neighbor who simply could not bear to throw away tin-foil pie pans because she had lived through rationing. After she died, her kids discovered her vast collection and it shocked them. She was not crazy, just traumatized.

How would such a thing transpire today? Look at the program SNAP, the new name for food stamps. For those who qualify, the money goes into a special account managed by the federal government. The recipient is sent an EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer) card, which is used like a credit card in stores. It costs taxpayers some $114 billion a year, and works out as a huge subsidy to Big Agriculture, which is why the program is administered by the Department of Agriculture.

Transitioning that program to the general population would not be difficult. It would be a simple matter of expansion of eligibility. As shortages grow, so too could the program until the entire population would be on it and it would be mandatory. It could also be converted into a mobile app instead of a piece of plastic as a fraud-prevention measure. With everyone carrying cell phones, this would be an easy step.

And where could people spend the money? Only at participating institutions. Would non-participation institutions be entitled to sell food, for example, at local farmers’ co-ops? Maybe at first but that’s before the media demonization campaigns come along to decry the rich who are eating more than their fair share and the sellers who are exploiting the national emergency.

You can sell how this all unfolds, and none of it is implausible. Only a few years ago, governments around the country canceled gatherings for religious holidays, limited the numbers of people who could gather in homes, and banned public weddings and funerals. If they can do that, they can do anything, including the rationing of all food.

The program that Harris has proposed is not like other matters that she has flip-flopped on. She is serious and repeats it. She spoke about it even during the debate with Trump but there was no followup or critique of the scheme offered. Nor does such a crazy plan require some legislation and a vote by Congress. It could come in the form of an executive order. Yes, it would be tested by the Supreme Court but, if recent history holds, the program would be long in effect before the Court weighed in. Nor is it clear how it would rule.

The Supreme Court in 1942 heard the case of Albert Yakus, a Boston-based meat seller who was criminally prosecuted for violating the wholesale beef price ceiling. In Yakus vs. United States, the Supreme Court ruled for the government and against the meat-selling criminal. That’s the existing precedent.

Nor does all this have to unfold immediately following the inauguration. It can happen as matters become ever worse following anti-gouging edicts and when inflation worsens. After all, a presidency that believes in central planning and forced economic austerity would last a full four years, and the coercion could grow month after month until we have comprehensively enforced deprivation by the end, and no one remembers what it was like to buy groceries at market prices with their own money.

I wish I could say that this is an outlandish and fear-mongering warning. It is not. It is a very realistic scenario based on repeated statements and promises plus the recent history of government management of the population. There is likely another wave of inflation coming. This time it will meet with a promise to use every coercive power of government to prevent increases in prices on groceries and rents.

What if voters actually understood this? What then?

Keep in mind the main legacy of the Covid years: governments learned the fullness of what they could do under the right circumstances. That’s the worst possible lesson but that is what has stuck. The implications for the future are grim.

Author

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

Brownstone Institute

A Potpourri of the World’s Unexposed Scandals

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By  Bill Rice  

How many genuine, shocking – and unexposed – scandals actually occurred in the last four years?  To partially answer this question, I composed another of my List Columns.

The Most Epic of Scandals Might Be…

The world’s most epic scandal might be the massive number of citizens who’ve died prematurely in the last four years. This scandal could also be expressed as the vast number of people whose deaths were falsely attributed to Covid.

My main areas of focus – “early spread” – informed my thinking when I reached this stunning conclusion:  Almost every former living person said to have died “from Covid” probably did not die from Covid.

The scandal is that (unreported) “democide” occurred, meaning that government policies and deadly healthcare “guidance” more plausibly explain the millions of excess deaths that have occurred since late March 2020.

My research into early spread suggests that the real Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of Covid should have already been known by the lockdowns of mid-March 2020.

If, as I believe, many millions of world citizens had already contracted this virus and had not died, the Covid IFR would be the same, or perhaps even lower, than the IFR for the common flu – said to be 1 death per 1,000 infections (0.1 percent).

Expressed differently, almost 100 percent of people who contracted this virus did not die from it – a fact which could and should have been known early in the “pandemic.” The fact this information was concealed from the public qualifies as a massive scandal.

Evidence That Would ‘Prove’ This Scandal

Furthermore, one does not need early spread “conjecture” to reach the conclusion that only a minute number of people who were infected by this virus later died from Covid.

After April 2020, a researcher could pick any large group or organization and simply ascertain how many people in these groups later died “from Covid.”

For example, more than 10,000 employees work for the CDC. About 10 months ago, I sent an email to the CDC and asked their media affairs department how many of the CDC’s own employees have died from Covid in the past three-plus years.

This question – which would be easy to answer – was never answered. This example of non-transparency is, to me,  a massive “tell” and should be “scandalous.”

To be more precise, if the CDC could document that, say, 10 of their employees had died from Covid, this would equate to a disease with a mortality risk identical to the flu.

My strong suspicion is that fewer than 10 CDC employees have died from Covid in the last four years, which would mean the CDC knows from its own large sample group that Covid is/was not more deadly than influenza.

I’ve performed the same extrapolations with other groups made up of citizens whose Covid deaths would have made headlines.

For example, hundreds of thousands if not millions of high school, college, and pro athletes must have contracted Covid by today’s date. However, it is a challenge to find one definitive case of a college or pro athlete who died from Covid.

For young athletes – roughly ages 14 to 40 – the Covid IFR is either 0.0000 percent or very close to this microscopic fraction.

One question that should be obvious given the “athlete” example is why would any athlete want or need an experimental new mRNA “vaccine” when there’s a zero-percent chance this disease would ever kill this person?

The scandal is that sports authorities – uncritically accepting “guidance” from public health officials – either mandated or strongly encouraged (via coercion) that every athlete in the world receive Covid shots and then, later, booster shots.

Of course, the fact these shots would be far more likely to produce death or serious adverse events than a bout with Covid should be a massive scandal.

More Scandals

Needless to say, all the major pediatrician groups issued the same guidance for children.

In Pike County, Alabama, I can report that in four years no child/student between the ages of 5 and 18 has died from Covid.

I also recognize that the authorized  “fact” is that millions of Americans have now “died from Covid.” However, I believe this figure is a scandalous lie, one supported by PCR test results that would be questioned in a world where investigating certain scandals was not taboo.

Yet another scandal is that officials and the press de-emphasized the fact the vast majority of alleged victims were over the age of 79, had multiple comorbid conditions, were often nursing home residents, and, among the non-elderly, came from the poorest sections of society.

These revelations – which would not advance the desired narrative that everyone should be very afraid – are similar to many great scandals that have been exposed from time to time in history.

Namely, officials in positions of power and trust clearly conspired to cover up or conceal information that would have exposed their own malfeasance, professional incompetence, and/or graft.

This Might Be the No. 1 Scandal of Our Times

As I’ve written ad nauseam, perhaps the most stunning scandal of our times is that all-important “truth-seeking” organizations have become completely captured.

At the top of this list are members of the so-called Fourth Estate or “watchdog” press (at least in the corporate or “mainstream” media).

In previous articles, I’ve estimated that at least 40,000 Americans work as full-time journalists or editors for mainstream “news organizations.” Hundreds of MSM news-gathering organizations “serve” their readers and viewers.

In this very large group, I can’t think of one journalist, editor, publisher, or news organization who endeavored to expose any of the dubious claims of the public health establishment.

When 100 percent of professionals charged with exposing scandals are themselves working to conceal shocking revelations…this too should qualify as a massive scandal.

To the above “captured classes” one could add college professors and administrators, 99 percent of plaintiffs’ trial lawyers, 100 percent of CEOs of major corporations, almost all elected politicians, and, with the exception of perhaps Sweden, every one of the public health agencies in the world, plus all major medical groups and prestigious science journals.

Or This Might Be Our Greatest Scandal

Yet another scandal – perhaps the most sinister of them all – would be the coordinated conspiracy to silence, muffle, intimidate, bully, cancel, demonetize, and stigmatize the classes of brave and intelligent dissidents who have attempted to reveal a litany of shocking truths.

The Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC) is not a figment of a conspiracy theorist’s imagination.

The CIC is as real as Media Matters, News Guard, The Trusted News Initiative, the Stanford Virality Project, and the 15,000-plus “content moderators” who probably still work for Facebook.

Government officials in myriad agencies of “President” Joe Biden’s administration constantly pressured social media companies to censor content that didn’t fit the authorized narrative (although these bullying projects didn’t require much arm-twisting).

Here, the scandal is that the country’s “adults in the room” were identified as grave threats to the agenda of the Powers that Be and were targeted for extreme censorship and punishment.

When people and organizations principled enough to try to expose scandals are targeted by the State and the State’s crony partners, this guarantees future scandals are unlikely to be exposed…which means the same unexposed leaders are going to continue to inflict even greater harm on the world population.

This Scandal Is Hard to Quantify

Other scandals are more difficult to quantify. For example, it’s impossible to know how many citizens now “self-censor” because they know the topics they should not discuss outside of conversations with close friends.

This point perhaps illustrates the state of the world’s “New Normal” – a now-accepted term that is scandalous if one simply thinks about the predicates of this modifier.

It should be a scandal that the vast majority of world citizens now eagerly submit to or comply with the dictates and speech parameters imposed on them by the world’s leadership classes.

The “New Normal” connotes that one should accept increasing assaults on previously sacrosanct civil liberties.

What is considered “normal” – and should now be accepted without protest – was, somehow, changed.

As I routinely write, what the world has lived through the past four-plus years is, in fact, a New Abnormal.

This Orwellian change of definition would qualify as a shocking scandal except for the fact most people now self-censor to remain in the perceived safety of their social and workplace herds.

The bottom line – a sad one – might be that none of the above scandals would have been possible if more members of the public had been capable of critical thinking and exhibited a modicum of civic courage.

As it turns out, the exposure of scandals would require large numbers of citizens to look into the mirror (or their souls) and perform self-analysis, an exercise in introspection that would not be pain-free.

It’s also a scandal our leaders knew they could manipulate the masses so easily.

Considering all of these points, it seems to me that the captured leadership classes must have known that the vast majority of the population would trust the veracity of their claims and policy prescriptions.

That is, they knew there would be no great pushback from “the masses.”

If the above observation isn’t a scandal, it’s depressing to admit or acknowledge this is what happened.

To End on a Hopeful Note

What gives millions of citizens hope is that, belatedly, more citizens might be growing weary of living in a world where every scandal cannot be exposed.

Donald Trump winning a presidential election by margins “too big to steal” is a sign of national hope.

Mr. Trump nominating RFK, Jr. to supervise the CDC, NIH, and FDA is definitely a sign of hope, an appointment that must outrage and terrify the world’s previous leadership classes.

For far too long, America’s greatest scandal has been that no important scandals can be exposed. Today, however, it seems possible this state of affairs might not remain our New Normal forever.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Bill Rice, Jr. is a freelance journalist in Troy, Alabama.

Continue Reading

Brownstone Institute

Freedumb, You Say?

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Gabrielle Bauer 

“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health”

Didn’t give much thought to freedom until four years ago, at age 63. Freedom was just there, like the water surrounding a goldfish. And then the Covid-19 pandemic blew in, the world locked down, and admonitions to “stay the ‘$^#&’ home” blazed through social media. No freedom was too important to discard in the name of public safety: jobs, family businesses, artistic endeavours, public meetings, social connections that kept despair at bay, all took a backseat to the grim business of saving grandma (who ended up getting Covid anyway). No discussion of moral or practical trade-offs, no pushback from the press, nothing. It felt wrong to me on a cellular level.

Apparently I was the only one in my middle-class liberal circle to harbour misgivings about this astonishing new world. If I tried, ever so timidly, to articulate my concerns on Facebook or Twitter, the online warriors shot back with a string of epithets. “Go lick a pole and catch the virus,” said one. “Crawl back into your cave, troglodyte,” said another. And my all-time favourite: “You’re nothing but a mouth-breathing Trumptard.”

From the get-go, I perceived Covid as more of a philosophical problem than a scientific one. As I wrote on more than one occasion, science can inform our decisions, but not dictate them. What ultimately powers our choices are the values we hold. I saw Covid as a morality play, with freedom and safety cast as the duelling protagonists, and it looked like safety was skipping to an easy victory.

It was a heady time for the health bureaucrats, whose increasingly arcane rules betrayed a naked impulse to control: the Canadian high-school students required to use masks on both their faces and their wind instruments during band practice, the schoolchildren forced (for hygiene reasons) to study on their knees for hours in an Alaska classroom, the “glory-hole” sex advised by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. The lack of public pushback against these absurdities heightened my awareness of the fragility of our freedoms.

One of the earliest memes to surface during the pandemic was “muh freedumb.” The locution became a shorthand for a stock character – a tattooed man wearing camo gear and a baseball cap, spewing viral particles while yelling about his rights. A selfish idiot. The memes kept coming: “Warning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.” “Personal freedom is the preoccupation of adult children.” Freedom, for centuries an aspiration of democratic societies, turned into a laughing stock.

Eventually, pro-freedom voices began trickling into the public arena. I wasn’t alone, after all. There were others who understood, in the words of Telegraph writer Janet Daley, that the institutional response to Covid-19 had steamrolled over “the dimension of human experience which gives meaning and value to private life.” Lionel Shriver decried how “across the Western world, freedoms that citizens took for granted seven months ago have been revoked at a stroke.” And Laura Dodsworth brought tears to my eyes when she wrote, in her 2021 book A State of Fear, that she feared authoritarianism more than death.

Once the vaccines rolled out, the war on freedom of conscience went nuclear. If you breathed a word against the products, or even the mandates, you were “literally killing people.” The hostility towards the “unvaxxed” culminated in a Toronto Star front page showcasing public vitriol, splashed with such sentiments as: “I honestly don’t care if they die from Covid. Not even a little bit.”

This, too, felt viscerally wrong. I knew several people who had refused the vaccine, and they all had well-articulated reasons for their stance. If they didn’t fully trust the “safe and effective” bromide recycled by all government and pharmaceutical industry spokespeople, I could hardly blame them. (And I say this as someone who writes for Big Pharma and got five Covid shots.)

One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture was freedom of expression, a core principle in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing news outlets. By early 2021, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 83 governments worldwide had used the Covid-19 pandemic to violate the lawful exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.

“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health,” the group wrote in a media release. “The victims include journalists, activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.”

But what about misinformation? Doesn’t it kill people? Newsflash: misinformation has always existed, even before TikTok. It’s up to each of us to sift the credible folks from the cranks. The best defence against misinformation is better information, and it’s the policy wonks’ job to provide it. Modern science itself depends on this tug-of-war of ideas, which filters out weaker hypotheses and moves stronger ones ahead for further testing.

Besides, misinformation comes not just from cranks, but from “official sources” – especially those tasked with persuading the public, rather than informing it. Remember when Rochelle Walensky, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, asserted that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus?” Or when Anthony Fauci maintained that getting vaccinated makes you a “dead end” in the chain of transmission? I rest my case.

The marketplace of ideas is like a souk, with a lot of hollering and arguing and the odd snatched purse – and that’s exactly how it should be. It’s an ingenious and irreplaceable process for getting to the truth. There are few ideas too sacrosanct to question or too ridiculous to consider. That’s why, unlike just about everyone in my left-leaning circle, I take no issue with Elon Musk’s shakedown of the old Twitter, now the Wild West of X.

Under Musk’s algorithms, my feed has become a true philosophical souk, with wildly disparate views smashing into each other, leaving me to sift through the rubble in search of a gold nugget or two. Love him or hate him, Musk offers a much-needed counterweight to the ideological lockstep in much of the mainstream media. And when it comes to free speech, Musk has put his money where his mouth is: when media personality Keith Olbermann recently hopped on X, where he boasts a million followers, to call for Musk’s arrest and detainment, Musk made no move to censor him. Works for me.

While the “old normal” has thankfully returned to our daily lives, save the odd mask in a shopping mall or subway car, the stench of censorship that blew in with the pandemic has yet to dissipate. An obsession with disinformation permeates the zeitgeist, spurring lawmakers in several Western countries to censor the flow of thoughts and ideas that gives a free society its pulse.

We cannot excise personal freedom from a democratic society, even in the interests of the “public good,” without poisoning the roots of democracy itself. Article 3 of UNESCO’s 2005 Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights states this plainly: “The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.” In our post-pandemic reality, the statement seems almost quaint. Nonetheless, it expresses an enduring truth: that a democracy must never discard the idea of freedom – even in a pandemic.

Freedom desperately needs a comeback from its current incarnation as an expendable frill. In my own small way I’m trying to make this happen: never much of an activist before Covid, I’m now part of a small group preparing to launch a Free Speech Union in Canada, modelled after the highly successful one in the UK. The organisation will offer legal advice to individuals facing censorship, cancellation, or job loss because of their words. I look forward to supporting people caught in this anti-freedom web, including those whose words I heartily disagree with.

My newfound respect for free speech is also what propels me to keep talking about Covid. The response to the pandemic exceeded the bounds of public health, and we need to expose the forces that drove it. Here’s Daley again: “The world went crazy. There is no other way to account for what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.” We can’t let it happen again.

Republished from Perspective Media

Author

Gabrielle Bauer is a Toronto health and medical writer who has won six national awards for her magazine journalism. She has written three books: Tokyo, My Everest, co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Prize, Waltzing The Tango, finalist in the Edna Staebler creative nonfiction award, and most recently, the pandemic book BLINDSIGHT IS 2020, published by the Brownstone Institute in 2023

Continue Reading

Trending

X