An Abundance of Scarcity

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Is the war still going on between Russia and the Ukraine?

Are there still any Palestinians alive in Gaza?

Who knows? The news cycle has moved on. No time to think about it. No time for study or reflection…The incoming news rushes in like drones, hot and heavy. Newsweek:

Republicans Ask Donald Trump To Revoke Zohran Mamdani’s Citizenship

That would be one way to eliminate the political threat. And it would be a lot easier than actually addressing the reasons why so many voters turned to a “communist lunatic” for mayor of New York.

We all know, for example, that the US economy is exceptionally beautiful — Biden and Trump both told us so. But the voters didn’t believe Biden…and apparently New Yorkers don’t believe Trump.

Historian Adam Tooze doesn’t seem to believe either of them:

The largest increase in poverty in NYC between 2019 and 2022 was amongst those in “deep poverty” which is defined as less than half of the federal poverty level. In 2022, the federal poverty threshold was $14,880 for a single person, and $29,678 for a four-person family with two adults and two children. In New York City, nearly 52 percent of the city’s poverty population of 1.5 million in 2022 lived in “deep poverty,” that is 750,000 people. Poverty affects entire sections of the city. In the borough of the Bronx, with a population of 1.4 million, the median income is $45,517, uncomfortably close to the Federal poverty line for a family of four. In 2022 New York City recorded a child poverty rate of just shy of 25 percent.

In terms of the inequality of income, between rich and poor, New York is right up there with Rio de Janeiro; it has many of the richest people in the US…and many of the poorest.

No surprise that Mamdani’s promise of ‘free stuff’ was a vote getter.

Free schooling… from kinder-garden all the way through university? Free public transportation? Reduced rents? ‘State-run food stores?

How would you pay for these things? Squeeze the rich until the pips squeak!

But in today’s world, the ‘pips’ not only squeak…they leave town. Rich New Yorkers already have second homes in Florida, Arizona, or Mexico. Give them a good reason and they will split the Big Apple in a New York minute. Then, where are you? The gap between rich and poor would narrow…everyone would be poor!

Inequality is a fake problem. It is a symptom, not the disease itself. And when we set aside the headlines du jour, and look more closely, what we see is a whole edifice of fakery — statistics that don’t mean what you think they mean…news that is meaningless…numbers that are false…‘facts’ that are fraudulent…and problems that are not really problems at all. No wonder the solutions are also fake!

So, along come leading democrats with a new one. The Washington Post:

Top Democrats convened a “WelcomeFest” event recently to discuss “abundance” — the hot new idea circulating in the Democratic Party.

The debate has been fueled by a recent book, “Abundance,” by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Well-meaning Democrats, it argues, have embraced so many complex rules and time-consuming procedures that government has all but lost its ability to produce — or get private companies to produce — obvious needs like affordable housing or high-speed rail.

Democrats are now proposing to ‘Get Sh*t Done’ — by cutting back on their own regulations. Yes, they’ll repair the damage that they caused…and avoid facing up to the real problem — themselves…by un-doing ‘improvements’ they made over the last five decades. After all, it was Democrats who ran the last two successful government programs — the Grand Coulee dam…and WWII. And they can do it again. Then, what do we have…abundance!

Yes, it is as stupid as it sounds. It includes, for example, building government-run grocery stores in poor neighborhoods. Supermarkets — even the most efficient ones — operate with very slender margins. Typically, they make about a three per cent profit on the goods they sell. What are the odds that a bureaucrat-run grocery store will keep a 3% margin? Approximately zero. The stores will lose money, just like Amtrak.

No matter. Build government-operated grocery stores all over the country. Hire thousands of clerks. Sell billions worth of purple drink and pop tarts. GDP goes up. Unemployment goes down. The statistics may never look better.

But wait. A loss means that you’ve put more resources, capital, energy, and labor into a project than you get out of it. Real wealth is destroyed, not created. And as you destroy wealth, you end up with scarcity, not abundance.

More to come…

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