Deliberate Deprivation
Atlanta, GA
May 28, 2022
We recently learned that Trader Joe’s is discontinuing a highly-desired cat food despite its enormous popularity. Stores can’t keep the shelves stocked. They’re being stripped from both sides of the demand-supply equation.
Customers love the product, and clean it out whenever it arrives. But labor, material, and shipping constraints leave suppliers unable to ensure delivery. With such uncertainty, Trader Joe’s decided to stop purchasing.
But in our reset world where the basics of life are becoming roll-of-the-dice luxuries, cat food is chicken feed. American infants are also unable to eat.
As if we were in post-war Berlin, the US Government is conducting airlifts from Europe to bring baby formula to hungry tots. And in many places, when it arrives, it’s being rationed.
Further along the road of life, people who prefer solid food are hitting their own potholes. Soaring prices, input shortages, and unsubtle propaganda are limiting access to such essential items as meat, fish, eggs, and dairy.
To help the masses pinch pennies and “save the planet”, our enlightened “leaders” steer us away from the hearty food our body needs, and toward “sustainable” diets filled with “low-carbon” insects, subsidized seed oils, industrial effluence, and plant-based sludge.
As his belt tightens and nutrition deteriorates, the common man is also finding it more expensive to get around. Or to stay put.
Prices for fuel are accelerating at an unprecedented pace, and the cost of shelter is going thru the roof. Rising rents force him to live further from work, while expensive gas hinders his ability to make the commute.
Meanwhile, as his cost of living rises, the value of his investments retreats. For decades, counterfeit currency funded debt, buybacks, and bonuses rather than fresh refineries, new reactors, modern factories, and raw materials. Paper wealth soared as capital investment stagnated.
Then, the last couple years, as part of the insane response to the covid scare, torrents of newly minted money flowed directly into American bank accounts. This was to replace income lost when governments forcibly destroyed thousands of businesses and the structure of the economy.
But it created no new goods, services, materials, or products. With consumption stimulated and production thwarted, prices rose and supply chains broke.
Fake money cripples the culture too. When inflation rises, time horizons shrink, and instant gratification reigns. As purchasing power drops, interest rates and insecurity rise. People try to get what they need as soon as they can get it. Saving is shunned, crime increases, and a fragile future is sacrificed to a possessive present. The inevitable results are around us today.
The people who created this inflationary fiasco initially told us it wasn’t happening. Then they said it was “transitory”. Now they imply it’s good for us.
By “us”, they mean them.
After all, our superiors appreciate anything that keeps the hoi polloi in their place and out of the way. Besides, when you’re as wealthy as many of our “public servants” have somehow managed to become, paying more at the margins for caviar and cabernet doesn’t much matter. But for those living on meat and potatoes, it’s devastating. The cost of gas is much more important to those who drive themselves than to those who are driven around.
Needless to say, none of the recent deprivation is normal, or necessary. And it didn’t just “happen”. Nor did it have to occur. It didn’t materialize from forces of nature or acts of God. This was caused. Deliberately. But by whom? And why?
As Bill Bonner once said, anyone can make a mistake. But for a real catastrophe, you need the government.
Every crisis with which we’re now confronted was caused by the State. Disrupted supply chains, distorted markets, reduced resources, shortages of labor, soaring prices, abundance of debt, a dearth of food, and misallocations of capital are all caused or exacerbated by government’s hyperbolic response to an exaggerated germ, its reckless intervention in a Slavic skirmish, and the continued dilution of a depreciating dollar.
On a free market, shortages are rare, and quickly resolved. Prices adjust to changes in supply and demand, production is redirected accordingly, and goods are re-prioritized based on consumer need as revealed by willingness-to-pay. Rationing, price caps, billy clubs, and bullhorns aren’t necessary to enforce mutually beneficial commerce.
For several centuries, with few exceptions, Americans relied on peaceful interaction, free exchange, and the profit motive to get what we needed. And, more often than not, after some give and take, we got it. Prosperity flourished, and civilization expanded. But suddenly, with almost every industry, market, and merchant beholden to top-down directives from technocratic “experts”, many Americans are no longer getting what they need.
Yet they are getting what our anointed meddlers think they deserve. But who chose these world-improvers to siphon our wealth, ruin our lives, and boss us around? To a great extent, they were self-appointed, if only by the other bees in their exclusive hive. They collect the honey while the rest of us get stung.
By not remembering or recognizing the source of the bounty we took for granted, we have in recent years allowed these cliques of “elites” to foul things up. The world-improvers are mostly unaffected by the calamities they create (except insofar as they benefit by them), and rationalize the destruction they cause as essential to the “greater good” of “saving the planet”.
Unfortunately, many people, particularly those most “educated”, believe this preposterous propaganda. Rather than appreciate the indispensability of fossil fuels to modern life, these indoctrinated ingrates pine for the pre-industrial energy that could barely sustain our Medieval ancestors.
Before coal was burned and oil refined, kings, nobles, priests, and peasants relied for sustenance on human muscle, the strength of animals, the vicissitudes of the sun, and the whims of the wind. Unless we want to revert to the squalor they struggled to survive, we need to use more fossil fuel, not less.
But we’re not being allowed to make that choice. The absurdities, aberrations, and atrocities we now regularly endure aren’t fortunes of fate. They are being done to us, by a vacuous coterie of self-important suits.
How and when did the people who rule us become so incorrigibly unimpressive? How can such a small group of people have such a surplus of hubris, conceit, insolence, and arrogance…and yet always be so wrong?
Or are they? Maybe they’re more misinterpreted than mistaken. Maybe what they’re getting is exactly what they want.
The other day the US president let slip that perhaps the imbecility they’re inflicting is intentional. As with the ludicrous “mitigation measures” under Covid, the purported means are the actual ends. As el capo de tutti capi put it:
“And when it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over.”
The “transition” to which El Jefe refers is a retrogression from reliable energy that sustains modern life to the fickle sources that people struggled to harness before the Industrial Revolution. And he made the pronouncement as if the fuels he wants removed aren’t needed to capture, develop, and deliver the sources by which he wants them replaced.
Fossil fuels brought mankind out of perpetual destitution. The world can’t and won’t be “stronger” without them. And, our president’s prayers notwithstanding, God would never will the calamities resulting from their removal.
Yet those who think they’re God are determined to do so. The over-educated upper-crust continues to extract as much grain as they can from the rest of the loaf. This has always been the unstated purpose of politics, to transfer resources from the hapless outsiders to the connected insiders.
But now, they’re no longer trying to hide it. A while back, before he applauded a scarcity of reliable fuel, the president admitted his sanctions on Russia would render food shortages “real”.
And for what? So Deep State chiselers, connivers, and crooks can stick their fingers further into one of the most corrupt cookie jars on the face of the earth? With food scarce at home, the gravy train rolls abroad.
As American babies go hungry, the US government repeatedly feeds billions of dollars to its Ukrainian laundromat, and into the pristine pockets of its “defense” industry donors. While it tries to strip guns from American citizens, it ships them to its distant satraps.
It’s almost as if they’re trying to instigate a revolt. After all, about the only thing of which they haven’t deprived the peons is ample reason to pick up their pitchforks.
JD