IS IT TIME AGAIN FOR NATIONAL RATIONING?

Well, I was not yet born, but I know my American history better than a good portion of those living in the nation today. And history speaks of the time when one just could not stroll into the market to buy certain items whenever one wished. There was a "no excuses" policy called food and gasoline rationing in place. Pearl Harbor changed the pace and purpose of every American. Almost overnight the economy shifted to war production. Consumer goods now took a back seat to military production as nationwide rationing began almost immediately.

The word on the street was, "There's a war on, you know."

Everyone understood, and most dealt with the new restrictions with patriotic fervor and civic pride.

The news today is grim. Food shortages worldwide, an obese population nationally. Spiraling gasoline prices. The falling dollar. An unstable stock market. Global warming. A public bored with consumer habits, itching for a defining spirit of purpose, a purpose greater than oneself, one favoring the nation (or as some might put it, the world) rather than the individual. Could it be that the Bush administration made his critical error in winning American hearts and minds in suggesting that "business as usual" was the tact to take while he conducted his war on terror.

There's no answer to that question, but rationing could again be on America's plate. China, Russia, Iran, Al-Qeada. All in the news, and seemingly wanted our national head on a platter. Our enemies are great and persistent. Perhaps we should all reacquire a sense of political humility. Perhaps, despite the initial pain and rebrokering of a system already teetering on the brink of collapse, our financial leadership should be seriously considering how a well-regulated regimen of product rationing would help steer this country back to the mindset that will prepare us for what is certainly in store.

Such a tactic would certainly put a heavy spray of starch into the britches of both the control-freaked Leftists and the grab-grubby Rightists. That would be fun to watch. Now what was I just writing about F.A Hayek?

STOP NOW YE PLUNDERING CAPITALISTS

AND MAKE US PROUD AGAIN. There is a under-appreciated class of pro-capitalist anti-communist citizens workers who feel great pain at what America and the global economy have become. We want better choices to be made. We do not wish to destroy in order to have magically appear some unlikely new world because we believe we know at what price that new world would begin. We are the radical center. We want change, but we do not prefer left over right, or right over left. Here is an interesting article on how big business steals back our money after exploiting us in the first place which continues to proliferate the algorithm of the rich getting richer and the poor becoming more numerous, if not exactly poorer. Don't yawn quite yet, the article is solid, and worth a glance.

As someone who had suffered the early part of his life under a brutal regime, economic and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek's keen observation that capitalism works better than communism is proved mathematically. A thousand business owners each working in its own interest can react to the shifting aspects of supply and demand quicker and more efficiently than a centralized committee can even begin to recognize a problem. This mathematical insight solved the riddle once and for all for us here at the Two-Fisted Quorum, as to which is the preferred system, despite the problems with any system, by employing a metaphor akin to the historical scenario of the slow, bulky Spanish Armada warships who lost to the smaller, faster English fleet in rough weather.

We must turn the tide in this fight against an oligarchy of the rich. We must fight for freedom and renewed opportunity. This notion that things are not right does not make me a frothing leftist any more than wanting to own a gun to protect my family automatically makes me an avenging angel of the Right. Come now, let us reason together.

ON THE ROAD TO SERFDOM

A couple of years ago I watched a roundtable on television celebrating the work of Friedrich Hayek. It changed my life, by putting a mathematical equation to the test by postulating very simply that a centralized government can't possibly move as quickly or react with as much practicality to untold and unforeseen market forces as can thousands and even millions of self-seeking individuals each with an expertise specific to his niche. Finally the scales fell. It al made sense to me after all these years of struggling against the Left with regards to working capitalism versus idealized communism. Yes, capitalism creates its own set of problems, but these can be remedied within a free and bustling democratic system, whereas communism will always tend to stagnate into a totalitarian regime.

Here's a quick introduction in pictures to the groundbreaking and influencial book, The Road To Serfdom by F.A. Hayek, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974.

Hayek’s central thesis is that all forms of collectivism lead logically and inevitably to tyranny, and he used the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as examples of countries which, in his view, had gone down “the road to serfdom” and reached tyranny. Hayek argued that within a centrally planned economic system the distribution and allocation of all resources and goods would devolve onto a small group which would be incapable of processing all the information pertinent to the appropriate distribution of the resources and goods at the central planners’ disposal.

Disagreement about the practical implementation of any economic plan combined with the inadequacy of the central planners’ resource management would invariably necessitate coercion in order for anything to be achieved. Hayek further argued that the failure of central planning would be perceived by the public as an absence of sufficient power by the state to implement an otherwise good idea. Such a perception would lead the public to vote more power to the state, and would assist the rise to power of a “strong man” perceived to be capable of “getting the job done”.

After these developments Hayek argued that a country would be ineluctably driven into outright totalitarianism. For Hayek “the road to serfdom” inadvertently set upon by central planning, with its dismantling of the free market system, ends in the destruction of all individual economic and personal freedom.

Hayek argued that countries such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had already gone down the "road to serfdom", and that various democratic nations are being led down the same road. In The Road to Serfdom he wrote: "The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule."