While I was reading Peter Lawler’s post on The Fat Tax, I was reminded of a conversation with one of my sons about the amazing abundance and prosperity in America. Even in an economy that we perceive as shrinking or receding or depressed, we live better than kings did, and even the poor do. Obesity is a problem among our poor and uneducated. Abundance is the new normal.
So, we have mostly succeeded in repealing the economic law of scarcity. In some things, we see the effect in the earth, that we can use resources faster than they can replenish themselves; like the fish in the sea or the oil in the ground, we have to seek what we need further and deeper. We will not, apparently, run out, but prices rise to reflect the greater effort taken to produce. Other things, like some kinds of food, we can produce in such abundance that prices go down relative to other products. For example, sugar is so easy to produce that we are becoming fat. Fat comes cheaply, not just on humans, but for consumption. Our government sees a problem in that the results of that abundance are now expenses.
Not only that, but we subsidize consumption, through food stamps and subsidies to farmers, thereby repealing scarcity by making true prices irrelevant. A week or so ago, Phil Izzo’s blog in the WSJ , Half of U.S. Lives in Households Getting Benefits noted that in the first quarter of 2011, 49.1% of the population lives in a household where at least one member received some type of government benefit. We can complain that spending like that by government is putting us in debt, but we are still doing it. Much of the population thinks it has a right to benefit, because the economic law of scarcity should not apply in the United States. It is simply not acceptable. All of that is a subsidy to producers of goods; people have money to spend that they would not otherwise.
What do they spend the money on? Apparently on food that makes them fat and products like televisions and other electronic devices that keep them sedentary, making them fat.
Our prosperity, what has it done to us? If we defied the law of gravity, we’d know the truth in that we will come to ground. Except airplanes hardly ever do and when they do, we call it a tragedy. Of course, when we feel the consequences of an economic downturn, and our economy comes to earth, when prices reflect scarcity in relation to demand, we now call that a tragedy, too.
What are the results of our repeal of scarcity? We all seem to be talking about going on a diet, that’s what. The choice before us seems to be an economic diet through either taxation or reduced spending. In essence, we exercise more or consume less. It’s a heck of a choice.
June 4th, 2012 | 10:47 am
“Fat comes cheaply, not just on humans, but for consumption.”
It’s becoming more and more clear that the notion that “eating fat make you fat” is just not true, never was true, and never even had the slightest shred of evidence to support it besides “hey, that sounds like it might be true!”
June 4th, 2012 | 11:59 am
He’s saying that sugar is cheap and so we become fat. The fat that comes cheaply is the stuff on our hips and bellies. Go to any impoverished part of the USA and what you see is not skinny emaciated people, but rather very fat people. It is indeed a world turned upside down.
June 4th, 2012 | 1:19 pm
“While I was reading Peter Lawyer’s post on The Fat Tax,”
Is that a more legalistic version of Peter Lawler?
June 4th, 2012 | 1:31 pm
Gene Callahan, God knows if the error was through autocorrect or my stupid fingers. Thanks for pointing out my error so I could repair it: apologies and embarrassed laughter.
June 4th, 2012 | 1:33 pm
Brian, I am not writing as a dietician. Rumor has it that that too much fat causes too much fat.
June 4th, 2012 | 5:00 pm
We most certainly have not repealed the law of scarcity. We never will, or at least not on a Macro-scale. We have however changed the scarcity of certain goods. Salt is a big one. Sugar I suppose is another, albeit technically lets call it corn syrup (a substitute).
Brian was talking Atkins. The key I think is not to eat carbs, carbs cause an insulin spike, and an increased uptake of nutrients. So theoretically you might be able to consume 3000 calories fat heavy and only absorb 2000. You starve your body of carbs and your body does not efficiently absorb calories.
Fat still has 8.5-9 calories per gram. It is not a rumor that eating a high calorie diet leads to fat (amount absorbed greater than amount burned off).
I strongly disagree with Brian. That said I don’t disagree with Atkins.
I slightly agree with Brian in so far as I think a 2000 calorie diet made up of say Olive Oil (close to pure fat, will cause you gain less weight than an equal amount of calories consumed as refined sugar.) 17 tbsp of olive oil about 2000 calories.
One thing that is cheating about this is that carbs bind to water, so you get more water retention eating the carbs…(if the metric is weight)
But if you eat 250 grams of sugar that is also 2000 calories. But the sugar will cause an insulin spike, and increased absorbsion.
But the increased absorbsion from the insulin spike short term, would not be enough to offset the caloric content of fat vs. carbs on a gram by gram basis.
You will get fat faster on a 250g fat diet vs. a 250g carb diet. But you won’t get as fat as the calories would suggest you would (measured on a scale), for one thing because the loss of carbs will decrease water retension, for another thing because the calories in the olive oil in a carb starved system will not be properly/fully absorbed.
In terms of survival if one person has a bottle of olive oil and the other has a 5lb bag of sugar they should share with each other, and to get the most of the calories they should always eat sugar about 3-4 minutes in advance of consuming the olive oil. In this way the body will absorb the 8.5-9 calories from per/g fat.
June 4th, 2012 | 10:44 pm
I’m wondering how the PoMos here would react to the coming true repeal of all economic scarcities by accelerating tech. As a Singulatarian, I’m expecting big changes caused by the emergence of full-fledged nanotech in the 2020s. Star Trek replicators in the 21st century, not the 23rd.
June 6th, 2012 | 12:10 pm
I thought you had to have made that up, but Wikipedia tells me Singularitarianism is a real ism.
Although acknowledging that there are some similarities between the Singularity and the Rapture (i.e., millenarianism, transcendence), Singularitarians counter that the differences are crucial (i.e., rationalism, naturalism, uncertainty of outcome, human-caused event, nature of the event contingent on human action, no insider privilege, no religious trappings, no revenge against non-believers, no anthropomorphism, evidence-based justification for belief).
June 24th, 2012 | 7:56 am
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