How To Create Starvation In 2016

One of the great achievements of the human mind is having produced a solution to the single greatest challenge of life on earth: getting enough to eat. Shelter and clothing are no brainers by comparison. You find a cave, you snag a pelt, and you are good to go.

But finding food to eat is a daily issue for human beings, never finally solved. You need more than a stock of food; you need a system that produces a continual flow.

In 2016, we finally have such a system in place, one capable of supporting 7.4 billion people. It’s so robust at this point that the developed world has the opposite problem of obesity, which, in the course of social evolution, is a nice problem to have.

The creation of this system – which you can see on display at any grocery store in your own neighbourhood – defied the expectations of legions of doubters in the 19th century. Population was booming beyond belief. How would they be fed? Most intellectuals couldn’t imagine how it could happen.

And yet it did. So complex, well developed, and productive is the global market for food that it turns out to be extremely hard to break the system. To create starvation in 2016 requires extraordinary effort. It requires a comprehensive system of coercion that attacks all the institutions that make abundance possible: ownership, international trade, an adaptive price system, the right of commercial innovation.

Socialism Strikes Again

Such a system does exist, however. It goes by the name “socialism.” It is being tried today in a country that was once wealthy, comfortable, and civilised: a country with the largest oil reserves in the world.

Yes, it seems like fiction. It’s not. In one country in particular, over the course of 16 years of unrelenting destruction of property rights and human rights, step by gruesome step, socialism has resulted in unthinkable scenes of human suffering.

That country is Venezuela. It began under the rule of Hugo Chavez and now continues under the rule of his successor Nicolás Maduro. As bad, grafting, and despotic as their intentions, it is not likely the case that they intended to create starvation. Rather, they sought to bring about all the promises of socialism: fairness, equality, an end to exploitation, justice, and so on. But you look around and what you see instead is the end of everything we call civilisation.

I can do no better than to quote at length from The New York Times report from yesterday:

Sometimes people wonder why people like me are so passionate about free markets and all that they imply. In the end, it is about the quality of life on earth. Will we thrive or will we starve? This is what economics is about. And it is not an abstract problem.

Any country on earth is capable of creating starvation. You only need to follow the path of Venezuela. Attack property rights and trade, pillage the rich, abolish the price system, jail dissenters, crush the opposition, dismantle the system of natural liberty that has fed the world. This is socialism. It is the path to hell on earth.

This piece was first published on the Foundation for Economic Education
and has been republished here with permission.