It sure looked like you were suggesting that to me, given what you said about having enough grain and then immediately following that with an assessment of who would have to make sacrifices.
Anyway, the problem you are describing in your above post is not problem with the "economic system" at all, that is a poor analysis of the causality - the problem is a much simpler one, it's a consequence of living in a (for all practical purposes) 3-dimensional universe.
A man holding up a bag of grain in Kentucky can more easily sell his grain to his neighbour than to a man in Bangladesh. Even if he gives away the bag of grain for free, absolves all ownership of the bag and sticks a post-it note on it bequeathing it to a specific man in Bangladesh - behold, the bag of grain still sits there at his feet, unable to be consumed by its new rightful owner. That is the whole of the problem with the equal distribution of food across the planet, it has nothing to do with a bad "economic system" in terms of buying and selling the food itself.
If you imagine a world in which it is possible for a man in Kentucky to sell his truckload of corn to anyone in the world through effortless teleportation, that would create the missing ingredient: customer parity. All customers would become equal, and there would no longer be a need to destroy a mountain of corn simply because it exists in one inconvenient location on a sphere in order to safeguard the economic microcosm of another part of the sphere.
If anything, the economic system works to mitigate these food losses, but unfortunately this involves another even more complicated global economy: oil, 99% of whose functional use is solely for transporting one inconveniently located 3-dimension object, person, container lorry or turnip from a place of lower value to a place of higher value. Again, a spatial problem, not an inherently economic one. Unfortunately (again), rising oil prices raise food costs (through overhead) to countries who import food, as opposed to who are relatively agronomically self-sustaining, so rising oil prices more drastically affect the food costs of third world countries and the problem is compounded.
All of which is to say, blaming rotting food piles at one X,Y coordinate that would not rot at another X,Y coordinate on an inherent economic flaw is faulty, it's simply a limitation in a physical universe in which moving an object with mass from point A to point B consumes energy. It would be like saying it is an economic flaw that people cannot simply directly consume their money; and maybe that would solve all the problems if money were edible and printed on Graham crackers, so that it always in every part of the sphere had a minimum value as fibre.
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dancing_serpent
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-14 10:35 pm (UTC)Anyway, the problem you are describing in your above post is not problem with the "economic system" at all, that is a poor analysis of the causality - the problem is a much simpler one, it's a consequence of living in a (for all practical purposes) 3-dimensional universe.
A man holding up a bag of grain in Kentucky can more easily sell his grain to his neighbour than to a man in Bangladesh. Even if he gives away the bag of grain for free, absolves all ownership of the bag and sticks a post-it note on it bequeathing it to a specific man in Bangladesh - behold, the bag of grain still sits there at his feet, unable to be consumed by its new rightful owner. That is the whole of the problem with the equal distribution of food across the planet, it has nothing to do with a bad "economic system" in terms of buying and selling the food itself.
If you imagine a world in which it is possible for a man in Kentucky to sell his truckload of corn to anyone in the world through effortless teleportation, that would create the missing ingredient: customer parity. All customers would become equal, and there would no longer be a need to destroy a mountain of corn simply because it exists in one inconvenient location on a sphere in order to safeguard the economic microcosm of another part of the sphere.
If anything, the economic system works to mitigate these food losses, but unfortunately this involves another even more complicated global economy: oil, 99% of whose functional use is solely for transporting one inconveniently located 3-dimension object, person, container lorry or turnip from a place of lower value to a place of higher value. Again, a spatial problem, not an inherently economic one. Unfortunately (again), rising oil prices raise food costs (through overhead) to countries who import food, as opposed to who are relatively agronomically self-sustaining, so rising oil prices more drastically affect the food costs of third world countries and the problem is compounded.
All of which is to say, blaming rotting food piles at one X,Y coordinate that would not rot at another X,Y coordinate on an inherent economic flaw is faulty, it's simply a limitation in a physical universe in which moving an object with mass from point A to point B consumes energy. It would be like saying it is an economic flaw that people cannot simply directly consume their money; and maybe that would solve all the problems if money were edible and printed on Graham crackers, so that it always in every part of the sphere had a minimum value as fibre.