New York City cannot claim farms, nor do you see herds of cows when you drive up the Avenue of the Americas. As a result, is the city “food insecure”? Not in the least. To produce in a market economy means to import.
Transferred to New York City, it is populated by some of the most talented people from around the world. These remarkable people pursue all kinds of work specialties and their brilliance exists as a relentless magnet for imports. That includes the food.
So yeah, New York City is “food addicted”. Known for having some of the best restaurants in the world, the city doesn’t produce any of the foods that the city’s chefs cook for their customers. The main thing is that addiction to NYC doesn’t matter. As long as its residents and visitors are productive, New Yorkers and visitors will never go hungry.
What applies to New York City also applies to Switzerland, the country. That the rich European nation is “oil poor” doesn’t matter, just as it doesn’t matter if NYC is “food poor”. On another level, the well-known neutral Switzerland could be at war with any oil producing nation and company on earth or have an embargo from them, but it would still consume the world’s oil as if it had bubbled up right outside Zurich. The Swiss would simply buy oil from those to whom the countries and companies sell it.
In a market economy we all ultimately trade with one another. And since there is no explanation for the ultimate destination of a good, readers never have to worry about not having access to a market good. As long as they are productive, the abundance of the world will reach them.
Therefore “starvation” can never lead to starvation. Though it may be a catchy song, Band Aids fundraising song “Do They Know Its Christmas?” From 1984 indicated that the tragic hunger the Ethiopians suffered was due to their people being in lived a nation where “nothing ever grows”. New Yorkers starve by this measure. In reality, a lack of economic freedom has caused food supplies in the African nation to decline. To produce means to import again, whether from across the street or from the other end of the world. The hunger in Ethiopia was a tragic consequence of a lack of production.
All of this brings us to a recent article by Timothy Egan, a rather alarming and emotional columnist for the New York Times. Egan believes that so-called “global warming” is an existential threat to Las Vegas. Yeah, you read it right.
Just such a view is ridiculously redefining. It implies that the Egan journalist knows something that hundreds of thousands of Americans, and realistically millions, don’t. As they move to Vegas in ever greater numbers, they seem blind to the devastation that awaits them. It doesn’t stop there.
As the mass migration of Americans to Vegas proves, enormous investments are flowing into the city and the surrounding cities. Think about it. Migration is usually a consequence of economic opportunities, and economic opportunities arise from investment. Translated for those in need, people flock to Vegas as investors pour enormous fortunes into the desert oasis, assuming positive returns will come from better times.
Does Egan know something that investors don’t? According to the columnist, planet Earth is suffering from “rapidly declining health” due to rapid warming. From Egan’s point of view, the human excess is causing a “mega-drought” in the West, which is “one of the worst in almost 500 years”. Imagine! We live pretty high today with our gas-guzzling cars and the cucumber-cool air conditioning that is supposed to kill the earth. It begs the question of what the sybarites did in the west 500 years ago to dry up the land. Well, it seems that centuries ago the hedonists either survived; that, or planet earth did. One has the feeling that the same earth will survive Egan. And future egans worth generations. So do Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles and the rest. Stop and think about it.
If it’s really true that human activity has forever changed weather patterns to such an extent that there is no more water out there in the west, then the very people who created what Egan thinks Armageddon is, will innovate around what the Newsman thinks it’s a problem. The irony is that Egan himself may have hinted how they’re going to do it.
As he put it in his hilariously over-the-top column, “To build Hoover Dam in the 1930s, an army of Depression-era daredevils poured enough concrete to build a two-lane road from Seattle to Miami. The dam powered Los Angeles and gave birth to modern Las Vegas. ”What’s the point.
“Cracked” and “sun-baked” as the western United States may be (Egan’s words), the source of human ingenuity has never dried up. Certainly not in Las Vegas or Los Angeles. The wealth in both places is abundant. And to produce means to import.
Applied to the cities in the west that are supposedly at risk of dehydration, what they lack means economic opportunity. Just as New York City’s “food addiction” doesn’t limit food intake for New Yorkers, or “oil addiction” doesn’t limit Swiss crude oil consumption, readers need not regard Western water scarcity as the death of the West. Because water is a market good like everything else. As it is, what Vegas et al. Should be deprived of being done in the market with ease. That is what capitalists do regardless of Egan’s nail biting.
It seems to the Times columnist, clever as he is, to have lost his knowledge is nano- or trillions of nanos relative to the market. In other words, what Egan has in the fetal position, when it is indeed a threat, is already priced in. Investors and people have moved on, shifting their wealth and talents to what Egan claims are doomed. The joke refers to Egan and his “theories”.
