I wanted to share some thoughts on a news article I saw the other day and as it happens with so many of these things, there's a confluence of information leading to some conclusions that I'm not sure are the most obvious to most people. So I just wanna highlight them here. The headline reads grocery
grocery rationing within four years. Now, this is an article by Jeffrey Tucker who's with the Brownstone Institute and he used to be with the Mises Institute and I'm not sure if he is still, but I know years and years ago he was anyway, this guy's been around, he's bright, he knows what he's talking
about and his focus is economics. He is a libertarian oriented free market economist. So um that certainly, I don't wanna say it flavors his thinking, but it, it accurately predicts the sorts of things he's gonna say. But this article is really well written unsurprisingly. OK. So let's get to his point
first, which is the headline, we'll get to the details in a minute. Um The focus that he has is on what is likely to happen if Kamala Harris is elected. I agree completely with his methodology here. His reasons for, for his conclusion. But I'd like to suggest that no matter which candidate gets elected
, we will very likely be facing grocery rationing within four years. And it is as certain as it gets that we will face drastic price increases in groceries in the next four years. So if you think that the inflation that we've seen so far is bad, I have very bad news, it's going to get a lot worse and
we'll talk about why we use his reasons which apply for Kamala's election. And even if Trump gets elected instead, we will see many of the same outcomes and I'll tell you why. Ok. So let's cruise through this. I'm not gonna read it to you. But his first point is any time, any time you have price controls
that, that they always lead to shortages of whatever is controlled. Ok? Now you can Google that to your heart's content as to why. But essentially if you cap the price, you cap supply because people will choose not to make something that they can't make money on or they can't make enough money on to
make it worthwhile to them. And so when the price controls come in, the supply reduces and it increases, sorry, it, it, well, it increases the black market price but it decreases the supply. And so there are shortages, ok? Now, and the second point he makes is this is not experimental, it's been tried
a bunch of times. It's been tried in the United States in 1941. And guess what happened? There were shortages. All right. Now, the pattern is in order to force people to comply, they charge an enormous fine in those days. If you, if you do the modern equivalents, it, it was $200,000 in our current dollars
if you broke the law. Uh, but it didn't, it didn't work. There were still black markets all over the place. Now let me ask you this, if this flies already short because people say, well, I'm I'm let's say a farmer says, well, I'm not going to grow that crop this year because there are price controls
. Uh or if you are talking about price controls with housing, the landlord says, well, I'm not even gonna bother renting my place. It's not worth the trouble for what I can get and rent. You further reduce the supply because of the black market. So the existing supply will be further reduced because
some of that will be offloaded to the black market because the incentive is so high, you could charge so much more, right? Ok. So there was rationing and it went very badly. Now, next point he makes is that it would be even easier to do that today. Why? Because of food stamps, the system is already in
place where they could roll out an extension of food stamps. And um if they did this, you know, for example, they could make it illegal to buy food except through government programs and then they're tracking what everyone's purchasing anyway. However, the details work out. Um This is something that
harris' repeatedly supported and it's likely to occur. Ok. So that's that. Now flipping over to what if Trump gets elected? Well, the details will be different but the outcomes will be very similar. Why? Well, here's just one reason it's not everything we're not going over everything here. But um you
can find a lot of resources from about to tell you, but unfortunately, almost all of them are videos and I, I don't want to take the time to transcribe these and show you this trend. But I did find this obviously pointed article. RFK Juniors plan to weaponize regulators to transform American agriculture
. So recently, uh Bobby Kennedy Junior joined forces with Trump. Trump is going to put him into some position on the cabinet and that will probably have something to do with oversight of food and or drugs. And here's the thing on both counts. Rfk Junior has some very good points in in many topics on
many topics. He has some atrociously bad points in each of those topics as well. So one of his really, really bad limitations is that he doesn't understand how much the modern food supply relies on chemicals or processes that one could easily make. The case are less than perfect. I'll put it that way
. I'll put it that way. It's amazing but not surprising that there are people out there who are obviously intelligent. RFK Junior is very smart in some ways, but he's really dumb in others. And what I mean by that is a person of this intelligence really shouldn't be making the mistakes that he does in
his policies. Ok. Now, I'm not picking on him. There are many people like this. Trump's like this. There are many people like this. OK. It's a very common problem and I could get to the root of why that is, but it's outside the scope of this. The point is if you suddenly make something, our current system
is absolutely reliant on illegal, there will be drastic vast consequences that extend beyond what the people making it illegal and the people supporting making it illegal. Expect why? Because they're complex systems. People don't understand complex systems, small changes create enormous consequences
in complex systems. The more complex the system is the higher the likelihood that any little change is going to have an enormous consequence. And the higher the likelihood that you can accurately predict it, it's, it's like playing with a nuclear launch button. OK. It's not something you want to do.
The problem is that all these analyses, they zoom in real close to the question at hand, like is glyphosate dangerous. That's a simple question. That's not a complex question. So suppose there's overwhelming evidence that it is the issue is if you look at that in isolation, you're going to come to conclusions
that cause much greater harm than benefit. A common example of this is the people that fixate on carbon dioxide from uh burning coal for energy. You can't decide the benefit of that situation by isolating the question of whether it causes pollution or not, that's way too narrow. Ok. So as you look at
things like chemicals in our food supply, the problem is whether that be in growing it, packaging it, shipping it or uh well, I said packaging. Yeah, wherever it is in the ecosystem. So the secondary or other downstream effects can be enormous when you change these things, it doesn't mean that it shouldn't
be changed. It doesn't mean that what we've got is the best it could be. But you don't just go into a very sophisticated machine and say, I don't like this one gear. I'm gonna yank it out. The current system depends on ultra inexpensive food. You cannot produce the quantity of food that we do using organic
regenerative agriculture. The way you do it, which I agree is ideal is you shift it back to small family farms and the result is what modern people will regard as devastating poverty. It would be the 19 twenties. Ok. But the cascading effect of that is a massive positive over what we have today. It would
be better taken broadly, but it absolutely will look nothing like anything people have today. And if you try to make, first off, if you try to, to replace what we have with something else, not small family farms, but no, let's keep going with the, just in time new food comes to the grocery store every
day, people buy a couple days worth of groceries and this is what they do. You can't keep doing that in any other way. And the closest thing to that what it looks like is Atro atrociously expensive food 10 times or more as expensive as what we have right now. Now, I'm just throwing out that number. Don't
quote me on it, but it's, it's a big enough shift that massive numbers of people would absolutely go hungry and the only way to feed them. So, and, and before we even get to starvation, there would be holes in the grocery shelves all the time, all the time. The only way to feed the people who would otherwise
starve is going to be through, inordinate taxes, new taxes that, or deficit spending wherever they get the money that expand, things like food stamps. And so we've already seen that happen in the preceding years, enormous expansions to the number of people on food stamps and huge expansions to how much
money they get that would just get worse and worse and worse on this. And that is not a good thing. Ok. A very similar thing to this happened recently by the same sorts of people for the same sorts of reasons in the pharmaceutical industry where there's a constant pressure for the United States to adopt
regulations coming out of the EU. And the EU is typically a lot more restrictive than we are on pretty much everything. But the EU decided to roll out a new, um, regulation that would prohibit the use of, I believe it was propylene Glycol. And I actually had a pretty good lens on this because of some
people I knew well, who were involved in preparing the rebuttal to whether it's the EU or the FDA I don't remember. But in short, it would essentially make it impossible to produce any of the drugs that people use. And that's a very summarized argument, but essentially the people pushing the change had
absolutely no clue how reliant the current system is on the way things are and the drug companies who obviously are not saints. They pushed back with the offer to approach this. But the request for much more time to do it in the time frames offered were, were just impossible. It would grind everything
to a halt. And so that's the issue is when you have bureaucrats making these decisions, they're, they're at best, they're looking at information in a very narrow way. And this is always the problem with centrally controlled government is that invariably you're going to have people making enormous decisions
who lack the information or wisdom to do So, and I'm telling you right now, one way or another, we're going to see shortages at the grocery store in the next four years. It's highly, highly likely. And even if there aren't, you're going to see the prices go through the roof because there are so many
changes in play that would result in that, that, uh, the, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of drastic increases to grocery prices now to transition this and drive home an even more important po point. Uh I've had discussions with one friend of mine who's into homesteading for years where one of us
would, would ask the question, why would anyone do this? Because it costs so much money compared to just buying it from the store. I mean, if you wanted to get a property to the point where and, and this is just to point this out in case you don't know. I hope, you know, but most people don't. Homesteading
is not about growing vegetables. Vegetables are about nutrition, not calories. And most people don't know the difference. Vegetables provide uh vitamins and minerals, but they don't provide, they, they provide negligible calories in order to provide calories on a farm. You're talking about grain or meat
and animals eat grain. So either way you're talking about grain. Very few introductory homesteaders think about this. You're, you're not gonna see normal people experimenting with ways to grow or harvest grain, but that is the staple. It's the foundation of everything else if you're serious. So it turns
out that it's not an easy thing to figure out. And people look at this and they say why on earth would you spend the time and money to figure out how to grow grain at scale? But at a small scale. So to, to grow a subsistence amount of grain on a small farm, it's not something anyone does today. Everyone
used to do it before about 1940. But you can look at graphs of this since then. No one does it to the point where you can't even buy the machine to hook to a small tractor to harvest and process grain. It's called a combine. They used to have them small enough that you could attach them to a reasonably
sized tractor and it would cut the grain, it would beat the grain and separate the, the actual seed from the chaff. They went out of production in the sixties because all of the farms were exploding in size. They were, they were combining. And that, that's uh that's ironic. But the combining farms meant
the cessation of the small combine. And so now every, every sack of grain that you buy at the store, all the flour you buy at the store, it was all harvested on a, on a full size combine, a stand-alone machine. And those can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They're enormous machines. And
you think these are only used during harvest season. So you have to have at least 1000 acres for the even AAA. Used one to make sense. A very much used one, a very old, broken down one. So um when it comes to homesteading, this is just I gave you some specific details there, but it's an extraordinarily
expensive enterprise to figure out things that have been long forgotten and also to solve problems that are really hard to solve. How do you farm economically at a small scale? Because like I said, in the 19 twenties, everyone was doing it with largely with knowledge that's been lost. But I in its local
knowledge, it's very specific to your climate, soil, et cetera and, and, and locally adapted varieties of vegetables and plants, trees for trees, et cetera. But more than that, how do you do this in a way where you, you aren't extremely poor in doing so? Because modern people would not tolerate 19 twenties
, subsistence farming incomes because, because there is no income. I mean, you, you're barefoot on dirt floors, right? And your clothes are made out of the the sacks that the flower comes in. So, and the houses are tiny and, and there's no HVAC, you'd be lucky if there's running water, you probably have
an outhouse. So it's quite a puzzle to solve that. And what my friend always says is that no sane person would do this because they'd be doing it for all the wrong reasons. And the point I wanted to make was all of those reasons are changing and I'm not even sure if you're noticing. See, it used to be
pretty silly to say something like, you know, I want to get to the point where we don't have to buy green beans in the grocery store anymore. We produce every, all the green beans that we're gonna eat, we grow ourselves and we freeze them or can them. Well, when green beans are five bucks a pound or
whatever, insane price, it's not so crazy anymore. And eventually you get to the point where normal people can't afford green beans. And then the only people that have them are the ones who, who solved the problem, who moved to a place figured out what varieties worked there. So they, they took advantage
of the fact that we have a luxury, luxurious access to see catalogs and all these different varieties and you can plant them all and see which one does the best. And it takes years to figure out and those seeds aren't cheap and the, the place to grow them that takes a lot of work to prep soil and water
it and everything else. We eat it and that's, we're just talking about green beans. What about beef? I'm telling you right now, there is going to be a time where normal people can no longer afford it. It's the case already for a lot of people and they just eat chicken now and pork. I'm telling you right
now, there will be a time when normal people cannot afford meat at all. And the only people that will eat it are the very wealthy and people living on farms. This is not some crazy idea. The writing is already on the wall and if you were more informed and honest and, and maybe little more capable of
, of reasoning, I'm trying to say this in a way that's not disparaging. If you're more intelligent, I'll just say it and honest and informed. You would see this clear as day. Oh, Rob just said, anyone who disagree, disagrees with him is uninformed or stupid or dishonest. Uh, prove me. Now here with,
if I'm wrong, give me the evidence that you're relying on to believe that I'm incorrect in saying that on this thing, but in general on anything. Yeah, please show me my mistake. Show me where my math doesn't add up because nine times out of 10, it's just that if you think this is extreme, it's just
because it makes you uncomfortable. It has nothing to do with the facts. It has nothing to do with the strength of the argument. It has everything to do with you being unwilling to consider certain things and being uncomfortable with certain ideas. So bring your reasons if you've got them and I will
be the happiest person in the world if you can show me something better short of that. I'm telling you right now, there's going to be grocery rationing shortages, vastly increased prices. The food, certain foods are gonna get so expensive that you will absolutely stop buying them again. It's already
true. The easiest predictions to make are the ones that are already true. The question is just how bad is it gonna get? And I just told you, it's gonna get bad enough that you're going to stop eating meat. Unless you're growing the animals yourself, raising them yourself, that's going to happen. You're
gonna see it happen and then you're gonna forget we had this conversation because that's always what people do. You're, you're not gonna come back and say, wow, how did you know that years before it happened? I hope it's years. You're just gonna forget and everyone will pretend like they already knew
that and they always did. But for the humble be prepared because it's going to happen. And the purpose of this God's purpose in making things harder as the end times roll forward is so that you are more willing to learn and live the way he would in your place to appraise things that have great value
with great value. Even now you are living better. If you live in the United States, it doesn't matter how poor you are. If you live in the United States, you live better than most kings ever did. Kings and queens. And what are you using it? For. You're using the fact that you can open up the freezer
just this morning. I had AAA luxurious breakfast. Ok, luxurious breakfast. And that I, I've been doing that the last few days and I eat pretty spartan the rest of the day and it just works out better for my productivity. You can open up the freezer, pop out your air fryer, you know, fry up some scrambled
eggs. You got frozen tater tots, frozen, frozen sausage patties, which I'm eating because someone forgot them in the back of the freezer and now they're questionable. But you put it all in the air fryer in 10 minutes. You've got this breakfast that's better than most people have eaten in their, in their
whole lives through history. Are you any better of a person because of that convenience or that multitude of calories and nutrition? I'm trying to get my sausage patties in before RFK takes them away or Kamala, whatever. Whoever does it doesn't matter. OK. But how are we living differently because of
it? I can tell you what I did differently because of it. But what are you doing differently because of it? Are you a healthier person? Are you a happier person? Are you a more productive person? Do you do more good in the world than some Pete Moss Bog peasant did 300 years ago? Because you probably aren't
if you're in any way normal, you, you aren't any better than that. You're probably worse than that person as far as the good that you do in, in your life and getting slightly off topic because of the bait and switch off of those bitter impoverished family farms, quote unquote. Back in the 19 twenties
, everyone moved to cities. That peat bog peasant. That's a really hard thing to say. Quickly. Probably lived in a nicer house than you do. Although they, they didn't have running water or climate control. You can look at pictures of these people's, I just saw this morning, uh, since we're on the topic
, I saw a picture of three houses from the 18 nineties, I believe in Los Angeles. They were large handcrafted beautiful houses. The one was owned by a carpenter. The second was owned by, I don't remember. It was another trade. The third was owned by, uh, just a normal middle class family. Today. They
would be seen almost as castles. People doing those professions could absolute or in that economic status could absolutely not afford anything like that. It was a bait and switch. And so all these changes are a reversion back to the way it's always been and it is going to be rough because getting here
took generations and it's all gonna be taken away in one and you're, it, you're going to see these things happen unless you die first. But the people alive today are going to see this collapse. It's a big deal. And again, it's the easiest prediction to make in the world it's already happening. So I hope
that this helps you change your incentives to make decisions that you previously saw is not worth the cost. You know, I don't wanna grow green beans. I can just buy a bag of them for a dollar. Not anymore. You can't. And it's gonna get a lot worse.