Silly season breaks out on food prices

All the socialist types, who loath the principle of supply and demand in the best of times, are bloviating over high food prices, and all the world starvation they will bring to the poor.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations in New York, Ban Ki-moon, blasted high food prices today, which he characterized as a global crisis, in a speech in Vienna. Riots in Haiti and Cameroon have led to deaths, sparked by high food and oil prices. Asia is facing a poor rice crop, so rationing has already started. Sam's Club and other discount houses are limiting rice sales to four 20-pound bags per customer, as hoarding sets in.

(Do you know how much rice 20 pounds of uncooked rice is? If I cook a quarter of a cup of rice for a family of four, we wind up throwing half of it away. If you throw rice at the bride and groom after a wedding, just the few kernals birds pick up off the ground swell in their little stomachs enough that they explode and die. You mean we're limited to only four 20-pound bags? What a crisis.)

The only half-way legitimate comment that's been made is that corn going to ethanol, rather than food, is at the root of the crisis. Since the government subsidizes ethanol in the U.S., it is profitable to divert a lot of corn to ethanol. Grocery lobbyists are calling for an end to the subsidies. This is a government-caused economic dislocation, which has interfered with the principle of supply and demand, and raised food prices.

There's a lot of reasons for higher food and energy prices: bad weather, burgeoning population growth in Asia and Africa, idiotic leftwingers opposing genetic engineering for more efficient food production--but the thing that definitely is not a cause is a filthy plot by the haves to deprive the have-nots.

Totalitarians, socialists and other big government types will seize on any problem to blame the free enterprise system. They're using food prices for that purpose today.