Global Food Crisis Caused By Federal Reserve Bank

In a recent American Thinker post (hat tip Larwyn), JR Dunn is right to be concerned about potential United Nations and governmental interference in the food market, but in his capable discussion of causes of today's food shortages Dunn omits the fundamental cause: economic distortion or malinvestment for more than a decade due to the Federal Reserve Bank's monetary expansion. Those of us who remember the 1970s recall that the Nixon administration's monetary expansion's resultant price inflation was blamed on OPEC and oil prices. Dunn commits a similar fallacy and blames current food shortages on a litany of proximate causes,such as ethanol, which while important are not fundamental. Dunn is right that ethanol is a mistake that causes food shortages, but it is not the only mistake. For the past fifteen years, from America to China, economic resources have been diverted away from commodity and food production toward real estate investment and construction. In China, farmers have been uprooted to build dams and cities. In America, farmers have sold land to real estate developers. This amounts to malinvestment of artificially created credit. Now there are food shortages. The beneficiaries of the monetary expansion primarily have not been oil producing governments but Wall Street, hedge fund managers, real estate developers and the commercial banking system. Those who pay are those who cannot afford food now, those in dire poverty. Warren Buffett, George Soros and the new residents of Greenwich, Connecticut have waxed rich at the expense of those starving to death now.

Food shortages occur only if demand exceeds supply and supply cannot adjust. Several things can increase demand. These include the factors that Dunn enumerates in his blog: ethanol and the like. But in a free economy supply will expand to meet the higher demand. Supply shocks can be handled over a few year period. If this does not happen it is because there are blockages. None of the factors that Dunn enumerates explain the failure of farmers to anticipate or respond to shortages. Yet most economic theory suggests that firms are rational enough to at least approximately do this. What would explain farmers' hyper-irrationality? Distortion or malinvestment.

Worse, Dunn's analysis overlooks increasing prices across a range of commodities, not just food and oil. Gold has more than tripled in price in the past four years. Copper and other construction materials, rubber for instance, have increased since the millenium. The factors that Dunn enumerates do not explain an across-the-board increase in commodity prices. Does ethanol explain a three-fold increase in the price of gold?

Moreover, Dunn's discussion of OPEC omits the force of mistrust. OPEC has found it difficult to act in unison because of what game theorists call the prisoner's dilemma: economic actors find it difficult to act in unison in their own self interest when any one member can make side deals to sabotage collusion. That is why OPEC failed in the 1970s. Today, a broader swath of nations produce oil, so trust will be considerably less than it was then. Higher prices would motivate players to go behind the backs of their collaborators.

Dunn is correct to argue that the relationship between politics and food should be severed. But he omits the fundamental cause of the global food shortage: malinvestment away from commodity production toward real estate and stock market investment. This follows directly from Alan Greenspan's and Ben Bernanke's monetary policy, which is necessarily the cause of all general inflation.

Community, Progressivism and the States

Woodrow Wilson advocated states' rights as part of his progressive philosphy. In his book Constitutional Government in the United States, first published in 1908 and still considered a classic in the political science field, Wilson argues for the importance of the states. The model of centralized federal authority was a product of the two Roosevelts, not of Wilson, despite his inadvertent contribution by creating both the income tax and the Federal Reserve Bank. Theodore Roosevelt, the most statist of all of our presidents, argued for integration of government and business. Franklin Roosevelt extended state power in numerous areas, most importantly by abolishing the gold standard.

Despite the twentieth century's centralization of power, Wilson understood the importance of local government to community. Excessive centralizaton overlooks the importance of community and so is anti-democratic. Since the primary thrust of the New Deal was such centralization, it was at odds with the progressive era's emphasis on democracy, or at least Wilson's version of it.

Wilson writes (pp. 50-1):

"Not only are the separate and independent powers of the states based upon real economic and social differences between section and section of an enormous country, differences which necessitate adaptations of law and of administrative policy such as only local authorities acting in real independence can intelligently effect; but the states are our great and permanent contrbiution to constitutional development. I call them a great contribution because they have given to the understandings upon which constitutional government is based an intimacy and detail, an adjustment to local circumstances, a national diversity, an immediate adaptation to the variety of the people themselves, such as a little country may perhaps dispense with but a great continent cannot...They have furnished us with an ideal means of integrating a vast and various population, adapting law to changing and temporary conditions, modulating development and permanently securing each item of progress. They have been an incomparable means of sensitive adjustment between popular thought and governmental method, and may yet afford the world itself the model of federation and liberty it may in God's providence come to seek...Constitutional government can exist only where there is actual community of interest and of purpose, and cannot, if it be also self-government, express the life of any body of people that does not consitute a veritable community. Are the United States a community? In some things yes, in most things no. How impossible it is to generalize about the United States."

Big business has likely pressed for centralization, and it is likely in the interest of big business to have consistent regulation and policy across the states. But big business has exited the nation. Manufacturing has moved to Asia and Mexico. The remaining large firms often do not pay high wages. Do the American people owe a favor to the firms that have not been interested in supporting them? Moreover, the problems that confronted big business in decades past have been modified, reduced and eliminated by technology. The coordination of separate regulatory, accounting and legal systems today is far from the problem that it was in the 1930s and 1940s. Integrated computer systems make compliance across diverse regulatory systems simple. Thus, large firms will suffer little from decentralization. Moreover, given the globalization of business and the eagerness with which firms have entered foreign countries with diverse regulatory systems, it is difficult to understand why adding more diversity will pose much of a problem to them, or given the eagerness with which firms have adjusted to diverse regulatory systems they can properly claim that they are an impediment here in the United States.

Toward Separate American Communities

Woodrow Wilson argued that America ought to become a community that is united by common belief. However, Wilson did not anticipate the brokerage of special interest coalitions engendered by the expansive state. Instead of a community of interests, the expansion of the welfare state resulted in heightened factionalism to a degree unforeseen by Madison and the founders of the American constitution. The factionalism is in large part economic. The Federal Reserve Bank has served as a redistributive, extractive mechanism by which wealth is taken from workers and savers and redistributed to investment bankers. This is accomplished with the full support and flourish of the New York Times and the mass media in the name of rationalization of credit markets and similar vacuous phrases. The brokerage of coalitions and privilege extends to almost all facets of state and federal government. It is related to the passage of every law. It imbues the very substance of the American system. Under New Deal Progressivism, America has not become, as Wilson envisioned, a community of shared interests, but rather a land where various minorities wage economic war on the majority.

Progressivism entailed an increase in executive power and a reduction in the power of the states. It depended upon the federal government reflecting a popular will. But today, the popular will is fractured not only by economic but also by severe political criteria. The liberalism of Roosevelt has, for many, turned out to be a failure. The states where the New Deal has been taken to its furthest extremes, such as New York, are the dying states. Yet, the mass media cling to the New Deal paradigm as any reactionary clings to his fossilized ideology.

Many Americans have renewed their faith in traditional American values and adopted a conservative position that evolves from twentieth century progressive-liberalism. The conservative position finds that the ideas of the nineteenth century had more substance than the old Progressives thought. It finds that markets are required for flexibility and progress. It also finds that new ideas cannot be adopted by government rooted in special interest privilege.

The competition between the forces of conservative progress and the forces of progressive-liberal reaction is bitter. There can be no community of interest in a society where one half of the public hates the values of the other; where progressive-liberals reject the conditions for progress, i.e., markets and the entrepreneurial creative destruction; and where progressive-liberals hold their own country as well as conservatives in contempt. Likewise, it is unfair to those progressive-liberals who would like to be subject to government control; who want the guidance of a powerful executive leader and do not care about the independence of entrepreneurship and self employment to have freedom thrust upon them. It is unfair to ask progressive-liberals who need social and political guidance to think for themselves.

The solution to this dilemma of war of all against all, of economic interest against economic interest, is separation. A separation of state powers to enhance competing models. Through competition the states can serve as laboratories of experiment for both conservative and progressive-liberal ideas. A libertarian state can be juxtaposed to one that is progressive-liberal. Differing ideologies and the mutual contempt in which the advocates of liberty and the advocates of state power hold each other need not be brought into overt conflict. Instead, let them separate. Let them experiment. Let us see which state flourishes: the state that extols private use emininent domain, central banking and government intervention; or that state that dispenses with these institutions, views them as failed and frees entrepreneurial talent from government control. Will the anarchic state or the totalitarian state flourish? It is only through experiment that the answer can be found.

The separation of power into separate states would have advantages beyond the role of experimentation. The brokerage of special interests would be diminished with more local control. Special interest pleading depends in large part on asymmetry of resources and organization costs. As political entitites diminish in scope, the asymmetries become smaller and the advantages of wealth and concentrated power diminish as well. Perhaps progressive-liberalism will perform to a better degree should it cover a smaller geographic expanse. Perhaps European states manage themselves more professionally because of their smaller scale and lesser concomitant corruption.

The New York Times on Ben Bernanke, June 20, 1913

The New York Times wrote an article on the McAdoo-Owen-Glass Banking bill, which became the Federal Reserve Act, on June 20, 1913. The Federal Reserve Act was passed in December of that year. The Times wrote:

"Banking and politics would be one. All experience forbids us to assume with any degree of confidence that appointments made by the President and confirmed by the Senate would be made with that careful attention to the need of securing fit and experienced men which the great importance of the banking business and its delicate and easily disturbed relation to the industries of the country so urgently require. We know that our Government is one of the least efficient, most wasteful and loosely conducted of the great business institutions of the country. And into such incompetent hands it is proposed to intrust the control of banking upon which all other business is so intimately dependent. Loans upon the security of farming lands are provided for. Does anybody suppose that the policy of the Federal Reserve Banks or of the Federal Reserve Board would in this particular be determined with entire indifference to the farmer vote? Or that in Congressional or Presidential campaign years the regulation of the discount rate or the determination of banking policy in general would be decided on by minds taking no thought of political ends to be gained? The germinal principle of the bill appears to be distrust of banks and bankers. We may assume that not only financiers and bankers, but business men generally will take sober thought concerning the centralizing features of the bill and the spirit and the policy which have inspired it."