price rationing

PRICE RATIONING


Well, there they go again. Another e-mail bleating that if we could all just join hands, sing folk ballads, smoke some weed and pray for world peace we CAN after all just get along. Oh, wait. Wrong delusion. If we all boycott the two biggest oil companies they would be forced to lower prices. On. My. Friggin. God. Becky! People, please don’t forward this kind of crap my way if you can help it. You are just embarrassing yourself. First off, and this is important so please try to pay attention to what I’m saying here instead of getting a dreamy look on your face and absentmindedly rubbing your nipples as you dream of a black knight on a white horse saving you from your own stupidity like if you think just putting a salad bar in every school will wipe out obesity, the government makes far more money on each gallon of gasoline you buy than the oil companies do in profit. They might put some of it into road repairs or they might just spend it on a retired mayor making a half million on year on his pension. You don’t get to choose. And second, the private oil companies are no longer in control of petroleum anymore. They are pumping less than 20% of the global supply ( if memory serves ) and the rest of the oil is under the control of sovereign nation states. And while we’re on oil, if you believe the article over at http://www.oftwominds.com/ we are still producing half of our own energy supply. Inferring that ALL IS WELL, REMAIN CALM, DO NOT PANIC. Ignored was the fact that several years ago the figure was much lower. His figures ignore all the imports we no longer are getting. And it ignores the additional cost of turning half our corn into ethanol. I’m sorry, I don’t buy that only waste corn is being used and the remains go to animal feed. If that was the case our grain and meat and dairy prices wouldn’t be through the roof.

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A lot of ink is given over to predicting the coming price rationing. Rather than, say, restrictions being placed on your filling up only on certain days of the week ( really smart, like saying water rationing works when the residents flood their lawns three times a week trying to keep them alive, in total wasting more water than when they were allowed to water daily ), the “free” market is allowed to ration much better by raising prices. What was the figure given for the number of pages regulating the sale of cabbage? 300,000? It is kind of hard to call our economic system free market when that level of control is in place covering every aspect of our being. Sounds suspiciously like fascism to me. But, just to go along with the propaganda, let’s call it supply and demand free market price rationing. This is the whole rational behind demand destruction. The price gets too high, the use drops, prices drop again. That works great with movie tickets ( absent Redbox, of course ) or automobiles. But not so hot with oil when to be able to afford a house during the bubble Sam and Suzy Homeowner had to live out far away from work. They have two choices. Pay whatever oil costs to get to work or start looking for a cute highway overpass to start living under. And it certainly doesn’t work with food. You must eat. Period. And not everyone can garden much more than their vegetables. They still need to buy their calorie foods.

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Price rationing isn’t meant to be a solution. It is a condition. The only reason the middle east is in an uproar is because of food costs ( arriving at democracy is a bonus, not a goal ). We could intervene. Not by sending Hillary over there to scare the crap out of everyone with her Satanic ways, not by counting the barrels of uranium we have left and deciding if we can afford to send a token fleet over there. But by immediately halting our ethanol program and putting that corn back on the market. We won’t of course. We started this course of insanity years ago with Mexico. Their oil fields started slowing production and we stopped sending them subsidized corn. Remember the Tortilla Riots? We are using food as a weapon as more and more countries started sending their oil to China instead of to us. Hello? Anyone remembering the 20% reduction in oil imports over the last five years? The only thing I can figure out is that now we can’t reverse course- if we took ten percent of the liquid fuel off the transportation market our economy would melt down immediately. It will get there eventually, granted, but no one DOESN’T postpone pain if they can help it.

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Price rationing has been in effect for some time globally. You’ve felt it, too. But the difference this time is that the supply of everything is drying up. We’ve passed overshoot some time ago. The point of all this? Prices rising are somewhat due to inflation. But beware a far more hideous reason. Things just aren’t there anymore. With inflation, eventually a new currency emerges. With scarcity, you just pay more and more until you can’t afford it. As the price continues to rise until the supply ends. There is no reset button. As Rawles has said in the past, “not available at any price” ( I like to pull Rawles kicking and screaming into my universe just so I shine by association ). We can hold on for God knows how much longer. Every trick will be tried to keep the collapse from getting total. This is a given. But are you thinking about how everything you need for preps will not be available, long before the end. Not available at any price. Do you think firearms are worth twice the price they were two years ago? Of course not. And it is no longer about Obammy. It is about demand. Never ending, ever increasing demand. Guns are just a bit of plastic or wood and a little metal. The engineering for them is 50-100 years old. They are not so expensive because of material or labor cost. But because of price rationing ( ammo went down, even though it is more commodity price sensitive-why? Every non-firearm owner is rushing into self protection, guns first and ammo a distant second ). All your preps will do likewise. Not just obvious ones like grain and guns. The sheeple aren’t as stupid as we think. The downside is you are being priced out of the market. Act now before it is too late.

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