A friend pointed me to a New York Times article about global hunger, food prices and the assertion that we're 'one poor harvest away from chaos.' In reading it, the sentence 'Some experts warned that the world could be on the verge of a "nightmare scenario" of cut‑throat competition for the control of shrinking supplies.' really stood out for me and started me thinking.

A couple years ago, I was talking with a libertarian about poor people, school lunches, and taking responsibility for one's actions. I'll see if I can sum up some of his arguments...

Poor people have made a decision to get a job that doesn't pay well or to not work enough hours to make a living wage. Even if they didn't make those decisions directly, they chose not to get the education needed to qualify for a job that pays well enough. So either way, their lack of income can be blamed squarely on them. If these people then choose to have children the can't afford to feed, then they should be locked up for child abuse because they chose to have children they couldn't afford to feed. It's all their fault. The public shouldn't subsidize school lunch.

Now...I guess I can sympathize a little with that argument. Bad decisions shouldn't be rewarded. On the other hand, the state of sex education is horrid and I'm not sure it's fair to argue that having a child is always the decision of the parents. Sometimes it's really the decision of lobbyists who don't want their own children exposed to 'pornography' in school. Also, the cost of higher education is not tiny. Access to college is something that your own parents' income influences quite a lot. But I think most libertarians would run off on a tangent about the 'indoctrinated liberal elite' if I brought that up.

What brought me to this blog post was the sentence I quoted above. In a capitalist society, what determines the cost of food? I would argue that it's the people producing and, even more-so, selling that food. So, if you're going to allow the corporations that sell food to determine their prices and govern their profits, you're also allowing them to determine who is 'poor' and can't afford to feed their child. And, if you're going to allow corporations to determine who can't afford to feed their child, you're effectively allowing corporations to decide who gets put in jail for child abuse.

As I said before, I really do have sympathy for the libertarian viewpoint. That sympathy ends when human nature and greed take over and destroy the ideals.

(This doesn't even begin to consider the cost of food in countries that can't produce enough for their population or the repercussions of taking the libertarian dream to its logical conclusions in other situations.)

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