You'll have to give up your gas car, insist progressive politicians. You'll have to give up private transportation altogether, say the more radical environmentalists. You'll have to give up your cheap incandescent lightbulbs for expensive LED bulbs — and we already have. You'll have to give up eating meat, says the UN.
What do all these demands, among many others, have in common?
Forced scarcity.
What was once abundant — affordable cars, energy, lighting, juicy ribeyes, human happiness — will be made scarce by force of law.
You probably already know, or at least suspect, that the plan is to make us so poor (and if the low-population radicals get their way, so few) that we'll be easier to control. Corral, even. But there's an irony here so delicious that I want to bite into it like one of those soon-to-be-forbidden juicy ribeyes I'm so fond of grilling.
It used to be so easy for communists and other lefties to achieve scarcity: put them in charge and let them try to achieve plenty.
One of my favorite '80s Cold War moments was when British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had to explain how prices work to Soviet strongman Mikhail Gorbachev. Thomas Sowell recounted the story in his 2000 book, "Basic Economics."
How an incredibly complex, high-tech economy can operate without any central direction is baffling to many. The last President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, is said to have asked British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: "How do you see to it that people get food?" The answer was that she didn't. Prices did that. Moreover, the British people were better fed than people in the Soviet Union, even though the British have not produced enough food to feed themselves in more than a century.
This was the same Gorbachev whom Thatcher found could follow "an argument through and was a sharp debater. He was self-confident [and] he did not seem in the least uneasy about entering into controversial areas of high politics." Nevertheless, Gorbachev was such a creature of Soviet thinking — they even invented their own useless, detached-from-reality accounting system — that he couldn't fathom the most basic economic concepts.
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But the West's victory in the Cold War really ended any debate over which economic system produced the plenty that people desire. In the end, one system was building billion-dollar invisible bombers and selling home computers for as little as $200, and the other ceased existing after decades of not providing enough toilet paper. Anyone today who doesn't know or understand that is either lying or a communist of 21st-century vintage — an inexcusable creature if you ask me.
Gorbachev, I should note, became just enough of a committed capitalist to take a rumored million bucks to appear in a Pizza Hut commercial.
The trick for the modern Western left was convincing us proles that forced scarcity was good for us, something we even wanted. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out, and it's an argument that's been made many times. But what I wanted to remind you of today is this: don't dismiss the efficacy of the left's arguments because people can and will get used to most anything.
Ayn Rand told her friend (and eventual unofficial biographer) Barbara Brandon a personal story that illustrates just that.
Rand was born in 1905 as Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Imperial Russia. She escaped to this country after the Russian Civil War, but her sisters stayed behind to live far more drab lives in the new USSR. After years of separation, Ayn was finally able to get permission for one of her sisters — Eleonora, IIRC — to visit her in America.
The only detail I remember from the story of Eleonora's visit is that she hated shopping in the West. Back in the Soviet Union, where scarcity and long lines were the norm, she had developed a genuine skill for sussing out the shortest lines and the stores that actually had goods for sale. According to the story, she felt useless in a country where lines were few and goods were plentiful.
I thought of that story during the early days of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Very quickly my wife and I adapted to splitting up the grocery shopping duties. I'd go to one store in town, hoping to find toilet paper and ground beef. She'd go to the other one in search of butter and paper towels. The one reminder left that we still lived in a land of plenty was that we were still able to text each other via iPhone to indicate success or failure.
"Honey, I was able to get butter but not paper towels" is maybe the only un-American thing my wife or I have ever said — but if the forced scarcity crowd gets their way, it won't take another COVID lockdown to make it the new normal.
