Food and Health Care

Food, shelter, and health care. These are arguably the big three needs. I would like to focus today on food and health care. Currently the national debate by the intellectual and political elites favors radical reform of the health care system such that the federal government would seize control of the means of production and distribution of medicine and medical care claiming that these goods and services constitute a special case which is too important to be left to private individuals and the free market. After all, without adequate medical services many people would die. Additionally, it is not right that the best medical care in the world should be so expensive. It needs to be made affordable. The sheeple nod their heads with near perfect conformity- or so we are told by the government-media complex. The only dissenters we are told are a few extremists. Nancy Pelosi has even gone so far as to say that those who protest the nationalization of the medical industry are Nazis and display swastikas. (Madame Speaker: prove your statement or resign from congress. When you accuse you must provide proof. You must stand or fall by those words or you should be granted no consideration, no respect, and no quarter.)

As I was saying, food and medical services are needs without which we will die. It is not, however, always an all or nothing proposition with these two needs. A great part of our national debate is over substandard health care. That's right, some people receive substandard or barely minimal health care, and likewise others do not get enough to eat. If I do not get enough, a minimal amount of nutritious food (not junk food) to eat then I will become less healthy and I will waste away. I will become prone to more diseases and ultimately I will die prematurely. It is estimated that one in six children in the United States is at risk of malnourishment and 3.8 percent of households in the United States had adult members who went hungry in the last year because they lacked the money to buy food for themselves. On the flip side of the food problem, millions of people consume non-nutritious food contributing to obesity and its myriad health consequences. To ameliorate the situation, perhaps our elites would like to nationalize the production and distribution of food. Imagine how much better it will be when congress passes a 1000 page bill outlining how and what farmers are to grow and how said food will be distributed to the people. Schools will not even have to explain the food pyramid to children anymore because central planners can determine not just what you should eat but what you will eat! I can hear it now, "obviously, grocery stores are the villains here because they charge money for food without which people will die. They are exploiting the people and are probably in cahoots with Big Agriculture. Why, food is a right! Food reform now! Food reform now! Food reform now!"

Imagine for yourself if a congressional committee after listening to a panel of experts were to decide how many potatoes to grow, how many chickens to raise, how many acres of green beans to plant and so on. How it is to be done to appease the environmental lobby, etc. Then they will decide how much to charge for it if anything at all. Of course, if food were free for the taking, people would waste food like there is no tomorrow and we would have shortages. But I don't think we would really have to worry about that. They would create another federal bureaucracy. Perhaps it will be called the Department of Nutrition Services. Thousands of new bureaucrats. Of course they will make plenty of mistakes determining what to grow, how to grow it, and what to do with it. There will be shortages. All food will be rationed and we will eat only what shows up in the government grocery store. How do I know there will be shortages? Because this type of central planning of the food industry has already been tried. This is soviet style central planning which produced shortages of nearly everything. No butter, no meat, not much to eat (unless you are a connected party member). In the United States, as with any capitalist country leaving food production and distribution to the free market, food is ridiculously plentiful to the absurd point where even poor people are fat. They may not get caviar and drink Dom Perignon but they do not starve and charity can make up the rest quite well. There is no better way.

The ultimate absurdity in all this is that we all know that food is far too important to let the government seize control of it and screw it up. Our lives depend upon it. Central planners and government bureaucrats and politicians never did anything more efficiently and productively than the private sector except for waging war and killing people. We all know that our food is far to important to let the government run it. Why then do we accept an argument that claims that health care is too important to be left to anyone except the government. There is no logic or reason behind it. I surmise that the real impetus behind it is the desire of the ruling class to seize even more power and control over industries and people.