22. Feast and Famine

SOME BELIEVE THERE IS a static quantity of resources in the world and that whatever one person consumes leaves that much less for someone else. It is true that at any given time there is a finite supply of available resources; however, as supplies are consumed, they are replenished or replaced with substitutes.

Let’s look at one of the most important resources—food. From 1964 to 1999, world food consumption per day in kilocalories per capita increased from 2,358 to 2,803 (19 percent). During this same period, developing countries experienced an increase from 2,054 to 2,681 (31 percent) kilocalories.³⁵ With 22 percent fewer acres and 74 percent fewer farm workers, U.S. farmers are able to produce enough food to feed twice the number of Americans and export eight times the amount of food than they did in 1950.³⁶ In 1950, it took an American an average of one-and-a-half hours of labor to earn one loaf of bread, one-half gallon of milk and three pounds of chicken; by 1997, it took only twenty-five minutes to do the same.³⁷

While famine still exists in some parts of the world, the feasting by people in other parts is not the cause. If all the food being produced in the world today were evenly divided among all inhabitants, there would be sufficient supplies to eliminate all hunger.³⁸ However, because of the tragedy of the commons, if all the food were to be evenly divided, the amount of food produced would fall to levels where all would go hungry.

Virtually everyone can be sufficiently productive to earn the necessities of life. Imagine if there were no borders or State restrictions on where one was allowed to move, live, work, or conduct business. People in need of food would migrate to places in need of their services, and companies in need of workers would move to or emerge where people need food.

Without the dictates of a ruler (State or otherwise), how long, in a free economy, would it take to see famine, for the most part, disappear? In today’s world, famine is caused by political policies that restrict free human interaction. Foreign aid is not the solution; it has had no positive impact (and possibly even a negative impact) on the so-called “poverty trap.”³⁹

Some believe that if there were fewer people in the world, everyone would have more to consume and be more prosperous. We hear that people in Africa and Mexico would not be so poor if they had fewer children. The Malthusian fear of population growth, although fallacious, is widely believed and acted upon by many governments.⁴⁰ In Julian Simon’s Population Matters, the chapter “Why Do We Still Think Babies Cause Poverty?” points to a dozen studies that show “that faster population growth is not associated with slower economic growth.”⁴¹

Population density doesn’t cause poverty, either. If that were so, Japan, New York City, and Hong Kong would be some of the poorest areas of the world. It isn’t abundant natural resources that create prosperity either, since none of these areas ranks high on that list. The idea that fewer people equates to greater prosperity is put to rest by Julian Simon in Population Matters, in which the author questions why our ancestors weren’t more prosperous when there were just a few thousand of us on the planet. During the past two hundred years, world population has increased sixfold, but the world output has increased eighty-fold.⁴²

One of the points I’ve emphasized in this book is that, given time, human ingenuity will always outmaneuver bureaucrats and circumvent State prohibitions when those prohibitions stand in the way of individual prosperity. An exemplary case of such human ingenuity takes place every day along the border between the United States and Mexico. Despite heavy border patrols, immigration restrictions, and a major language barrier, many millions of Mexicans have found their way to those who want their services. An underground network of facilitators has evolved to help merge the complementary needs of Americans and Mexicans.

Some argue that we must limit the number of immigrant workers entering the U.S. because we can’t assimilate them all. The very reason they keep coming is proof that they can be assimilated. If no one wanted to hire them, they would simply stop coming. There is no need for a central planner to determine how many immigrant workers we can assimilate; the marketplace will determine that number with utmost efficiency.

The major hindrances to bringing employers and Mexican workers together are Mexico’s laws that regulate, prohibit, and restrict the operations of foreign-owned businesses. If foreign companies were free to make the most of Mexican labor without such restrictions, it would not be necessary for so many workers to leave their families to find work here—employers would accommodate them where they live. If Mexico’s political rulers (not to be excluded from other rulers) wanted to improve the living conditions of Mexicans, they could simply lift the restrictions on foreign ownership, drastically reduce taxes, and eliminate regulations relative to labor, imports, and exports. Then they could sit back and let the market bring prosperity to their country. It does not require any planning; prosperity evolves spontaneously. Beyond the opposition to such plans by rulers are those concerned that foreign entrepreneurs will exploit cheap labor in poor countries and get rich in the process. But the very possibility of getting rich is what will bring those with that dream to those who want a better life and are eager to find a way out of poverty.

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³⁵World Health Organization, technical report series 916, “Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases,” chap. 3; http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/AC911E/ac911e05.htm#bm05.

³⁶Milton Hallberg, “U.S. Farm Policy: Are New Approaches Needed?” Farm Economics 4 (2001).

³⁷W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm, Myths of Rich and Poor: Why We’re Better Off Than We Think (New York: Basic Books 1999), p. 43.

³⁸“Global Food Trends: Prospects for Future Food Security,” http://www.unsystem.org/scn/archives/scnnews11/ch14.htm.

³⁹James D. Gwartney, Robert A. Lawson, and William Easterly, Economic Freedom of the World: 2006 Annual Report, chap. 2: Freedom Versus Collectivism in Foreign Aid,” The Fraser Institute (www.fraserinstitute.ca).

⁴⁰“The Principle of Population” by Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) was based on the idea that population, if unchecked, increases at a geometric rate (e.g., 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.), whereas the food supply grows at an arithmetic rate (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.).

⁴¹Julian Simon, Population Matters: People, Resources, Environment, and Immigration (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1990).

⁴²David Osterfeld, “Overpopulation: The Perennial Myth,” The Freeman (September 1993).