Just Don’t Call It “Rationing”

I want to say a few words about libertarian logic that says only government can ration; therefore, there is no rationing in a private, for-profit health care system; therefore, in a private system people who aren’t getting the care they need have only themselves to blame.

There’s an article about addressing famine by Frederick Kaufman in the June issue of Harper’s. In “Let Them Eat Cash,” Kaufman explains that ideas about how to address famine have changed from the old CARE package days. But this is the bit that most interested me:

The stories varied in focus and emphasis but employed the same basic plot points: biofuel production, caterpillar plagues, commodity speculation, crop disease, drought, dwindling stockpiles, fear, flood, hoarding, war, and an increasing world appetite for meat and dairy had bubbled into a nasty poison. Every day, another 25,000 people starved to death or died from hunger-related disease: every four seconds, another corpse. Rising prices for corn, cooking oil, rice, soybeans, and wheat had sparked riots in Bangladesh, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, and nineteen other countries. Not to mention Milwaukee, where a food voucher line of nearly 3,000 people descended into chaos. (“They just went crazy down there,” said one witness. “Just totally crazy.”)

Oddly enough, almost none of the food riots had emerged from a lack of food. There was plenty of food. The riots had been generated by the lack of money to buy food, and therein lay what may have distinguished today’s hunger from the hunger of years past.

Kaufman goes on to describe the cast of characters (and I mean that in the fullest sense of the word) who are more or less in charge of getting food to the starving, and how the director of the World Food Program actually bubbled about how starvaion presented a wonderful opportunity. It’s a fascinating read.

But the larger point is — if you’re starving to death, how much does it matter if you lack food because of scarcity or prices?

These various food shortages are caused by myriad factors, but for the most part food is being produced by private agricultural industries, and for the most part private market forces are setting prices. And people starve.

Once again, let’s remember the Famine. In th 1840s most Irish did farm work on land owned by others, and in exchange for farm work the workers were given little huts to live in and little plots of land on which to grow their own food, mostly potatoes. Potatoes are nutrient-rich and keep for a long time, and the Irish depended on them for food, especially in the winter. But then a disease wiped out the potato crop several years in a row. The agricultural workers of Ireland were growing plenty of food for the landowners, but the landowners shipped the food to markets in Britain. The Irish peasants had no money to buy it, so more than a million Irish starved. No government food rationing was involved; that was strictly the work of the privately owned farming industry of Ireland.

And in Parliament, some PMs actually argued that the Famine was a great opportunity, because starvation might force the Irish to start businesses. That the Irish Catholic peasantry were barely educated and had no access to capital did not register.

The fact is, people have been deprived of essential resources all kinds of ways. I’m betting that if you looked at all of history, more people have been deprived of resources by private interests than by governments.

Here’s another little bit from the Kaufman article you might enjoy:

Even the most well-intentioned, well-fed capitalist may fail to recognize that his own actions are causing the very problems he most sincerely wants to solve. After all, it is rational to invest in a commodity when its price rises, even if corn costs do happen to push up feed prices. Chickens eat chicken feed made from that corn, so the price of a dozen organic eggs hits $6.39. “All indications are that soaring feed costs are going to force livestock and poultry producers to raise prices,” said Joel Brandenberger, president of the National Turkey Federation, “or risk going out of business.” Bill Roenigk, chief economist of the National Chicken Council, predicted that “food inflation is poised to begin and continue for many, many months.” All of which impelled Iowa Senator Charles Grassley to wax rabid and liken the American grocery lobby to the Nazi Party. “They have to have an excuse for increasing the price of their food,” said Grassley. “It’s another Adolf Hitler lie.”

Fascinating.

Update: Something I forgot to say before I pushed the “publish” button — the situation in the U.S. regarding health care may be unprecedented. At least, I can’t think of any other time in history when so many people vulnerable to or actually suffering deprivation of resources are passionately supporting the status quo and fighting the very reforms meant to help them. I hope the social psychologists are taking good notes.

9 thoughts on “Just Don’t Call It “Rationing”

  1. “if you’re starving to death, how much does it matter if you lack food because of scarcity or prices?”

    It matters a great deal. If the problem is prices, it makes perfect sense to join with fellow sufferers to riot and steal what food one can as a group. If the problem is scarcity, it makes some sense to steal food on one’s own, but not as part of a large group. The former is a positive sum game; the latter a zero sum game.

    If you don’t want to riot and have some alternate mechanism for social restructuring, the price case offers more possibilities than the scarcity case as others will find it useful joining you rather than fighting you.

    • Kaleberg, you’re missing some reality here. First, if the problem is extreme scarcity, there is no food to steal. If you check history, what generally happens during times of genuine famine is that people lay down and die. They eat things that are not edible, like tree bark; they resort to cannibalism. Read up on St. Petersburg in WWII, for example. People made soup from the bodies of their children.

      If the food shortage leaves the wealthy hoarding food and the peasants without — which happened, for example, in Rome from time to time — the plebians can overwhelm the nobility and demand the granaries be opened. (Then when that food was gone, everybody went hungry.) However, that didn’t happen much in Ireland. At first there was all kinds of food, but the Irish mostly just died. There was some anti-landlord violence after a couple of years, and a few landlords were shot and killed, but that really didn’t help anybody get food. Eventually, so many farm workers were either evicted, left Ireland or died that food production dropped.

      Once the famine has become extreme, people eventually reach a point at which they are unable to function. During the Famine, bodies often were left unburied because the living lacked the physical strength to bury them. The only solution for many was to leave Ireland. The aftermath of the Famine brought little in social change. The landlord system didn’t end until 1903, by an act of Parliament.

  2. “if you’re starving to death, how much does it matter if you lack food because of scarcity or prices?”

    Maha, I understand what you’re saying to Kaleberg and I agree that if you’re starving to death, you’re starving to death, but the difference between scarcity and prices would have a big impact on how readily I’d accept my eventual demise. Before I got priced out of survival I would revert to the law of the jungle to increase my chances at survival. So to me, those two conditions matter considerably.

  3. I think the health care thing is really interesting because hoarding does not help the wealthy. Unless you are really a sick puppy, you can only get so many mammograms, colonoscopies, digital prostate checks etc. If more people got these regularly the cost would actually come down somewhat when the rich wanted their yearly physical. On the other hand, what are the wealthy going to do when a certain percentage of the 50 million or so uninsured get swine flu this winter and do not seek medical treatment until they have spread the virus far and wide? I suppose some of the very wealthy will simply hole up in their enclaves until the virus burns out, but it sort of sucks to have almost as much money as God and have to sit home 24/7 for 18 months or so. The wealthy do not care about health reform, but they should.

  4. Tragically, my Grandfather was one of, if not the architect’s, then certainly one of the overseer’s of the famine in Ukraine in the 1920’s and 30’s.
    My father, now almost 84, still can’t speak of those years. They ALL went hungry, the people in the government and the people that were starved. Certainly, those in the Soviet government got enough to eat – just barely enough to eat. That was called, in our modern terms, incentive.
    What stories my father does tell, explains a system gone wild. He was just a boy, but he saw what went on.
    Yes, those starvations were politicallyh motivated. The Soviet’s had to get rid of the local landowner’s, the Kulak’s.
    There is NO similarity to what is happening in the US. NONE!
    Not one to the Soviet policies, and certainly not one to the Nazi ones.
    Any correlation is purely the conflation of right-wing, conservative minds.
    Get over it and realize one thing, Conservatives – you, and your PRIVATE Corporations are the ones rationing any care, NOT the governement!
    But, I have a better chance of expaining Quantum Physic’s to a monkey than I am explaining this to a Conservative or Republican.

  5. You all need to see the movie, “Food, Inc.” and you will view the whole industry differently. It is how they produce the food that they give us that is making us sick. Not to mention the cruelty done to the animals producing the food. It’s all just one big money-making scheme, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Then, of course, when we get sick, they get even more of our money.

  6. I suppose some of the very wealthy will simply hole up in their enclaves until the virus burns out, but it sort of sucks to have almost as much money as God and have to sit home 24/7 for 18 months or so. The wealthy do not care about health reform, but they should.

    They’re very short sighted in this instance, aren’t they? I mean, farmers make sure their livestock is reasonably wealthy and reasonably well fed so they can market the meat. What about those who toil in their businesses and buy their products? If we all get sick, what happens to productivity? Should we not be treated at least as well as their livestock?

    Very short sighted.

  7. I can’t say for certain, but I’m sure that “culling the herd” is viewed positively in conservative circles.

  8. What do you mean you’re not certain,moonbat? Culling the herd is a bedrock principle of conservatism. God has no tolerance for freeloaders or wishy washy liberals who think they know better than him….the bible clearly says if you don’t work..you don’t eat. Death is the just recompense for sloth.
    God designed us to prosper, and we can’t prosper if we have to carry around the dead weight of the sick, infirmed, or financial under achievers .

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