Kicking. Squealing.
Wait a minute, I didn’t think liberal Keynesians considered this a problem during an economic lull with high unemployment and excess capacity:
Each year, about 40 percent of all food in the United States goes uneaten. It’s just tossed out or left to rot. And that’s a fairly large waste of resources. All that freshwater and land, all that fertilizer and energy — for nothing. By one count, Americans are simply squandering the equivalent of $165 billion each year by rubbishing so much food.
It was proto-liberal Matt Yglesias who wrote a year ago about the benefits of shop-lifting in a down economy:
It seems to me that in an economy with high unemployment and excess capacity, a temporary increase in shoplifting would in fact create jobs. Why? Well, retailers place their orders on a forward-looking basis. If you think you can sell stuff at a profit in the future, you order stuff. The shoplifting surge would reduce inventories, and cause a spike in orders. That would mean extra employment in manufacturing and transportation.
This seems to me to be similar to the alleged broken windows fallacy. Having goods vanish off store shelves would produce no additional jobs if full employment were already in effect since it wouldn’t be possible to create any extra goods. Only technological improvements to move the production frontier outward would raise living standards. But if there are unemployed people sitting around, then why shouldn’t shoplifting boost employment? Of course we need to distinguish a temporary surge in shoplifting from a permanent increase in the level of shoplifting. The latter would merely increase retailers’ costs and depress the economy.
So really we should just buy, cook, and order food that we don’t really need. Order two Big Macs and throw one away; it’s good for the country. That extra foodstuff employs more people for more hours. Being a conservationist is bad for the economy.
The problem of surplus production is only going to get worse with automation. In not that many years it will be fairly easy to produce even more goods with little labor input.
No labor “inefficiency” means no consumers for all those goods.
To put it another way, when a robot factory used loading robots to put goods into self driving truck where they are sold by self checkout who is going to be buying all that stuff?
we can’t all be content rentiers .
The obvious solution is some kind of citizens wage but in a world with such economic inequities and given human nature (people are tribal) and the pressures of the open border twats and the Norquistians , its not feasible .
I suspect that in essence for anyone who doesn’t prepare by going resilient or doesn’t have some means to get rich will be poor and may starve or die.
Alternately we may get a die back as people stop reproducing.
the future will suck.
Given our obesity rate, we should be throwing away a lot more than 40% of our food.
The report also notes there’s a great deal of confusion around expiration labels, which tend to be confusing and often prompt people to throw out food prematurely. (The British government has recently moved to revise these standards to make them less perplexing.)
I can judge if food is ok to eat as long as it is not rancid. I do not want a “Best Before Date”, I want a “Kill You After Date”.
“Being a conservationist is bad for the economy.”
yup, this ain’t grandpa’s economy. If you are not buying stuff, then you’re just a burden on others.
Buy! Buy! Even on Credit!
And fear not; Should you not be able to repay, They Don’t Deserve Their Money Back, The Rich Bastards!
And how is the shopkeeper supposed to pay to replace the shit you stole, Matt? Steal it from the wholesaler, who in turn steals from the manufacturer, who in turn can’t pay his workers? I believe you just described North Korea, and you see how well that’s worked out.
hewlew, Social Credit is not theft except in the sense that inflation is theft which it isn’t. What you do is put everybody on the dole and either tax or mint the funds needed. Costwise its not that different than the bloated welfare state we already have.
Also to those who think we can cheap out on paying for civilization, no you can’t. Cities and all that are frighteningly expensive, especially if you want quality citizens and all those property rights and amenities even the most basic (road, bridges, collecting interest, rule of law) cost money and lots of it to defend. Public order is crazy costly too. Its not an entitlement, you aren’t owed it by natural or moral law. Like anything TANSTAAFL , you must pay for it.
A society that only spends on defense is one that will end up a military state and trust me on this no one is more socialist that the military. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (to paraphrase Marx) is pretty much how the military works.
Other models, ignoring the have nots have been tried and sooner or later, best case scenario, that wonderful free civilization everyone wants will die without inputs.
And to a last point, an individual can to some degree save to invest later to increase a standard of living a society cannot. It must spend on things, now or on long term projects to make prosperity. Now granted ours is wasteful and not all spending is good but thats an issue of the corruption inherent in our model.
put simply a functioning civilization with cities (city states run a bit different ) and a sizable population will be costly.
Now you certainly can have a cheaper model, small farmsteads like the Founding Fathers liked can be brittle at times individually but they work in aggregate If you support a much smaller population and if you accept much less surplus wealth generation they can be very stable.
However such society won’t be as rich or have much economic mobility.
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