Another Journalist Flunked Econ 101.

Josh Gerstein, a reporter for The New York Sun, has taken scare journalism to a new low. He reports that food rationing is now occurring in the United States. It happens even as we sleep. He even accuses us of hoarding food when we shop at Costco.

Gerstein samples the panic and desperation that stampedes voraciously through the panic-stricken masses of Mountain View, California.

At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.

"Where's the rice?" an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. "You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous."

Not to be outdone, survivalists have dusted off the tin-foil hats and began auditioning as harbingers of Modern Man’s inevitable doom. It seems that a certain congressman from The Great State of Texas shut down Ye Olde Survival Letter a few issues too soon. We’ll all still make it through, others have picked up the fallen flag.

"It's sporadic. It's not every store, but it's becoming more commonplace," the editor of SurvivalBlog.com, James Rawles, said. "The number of reports I've been getting from readers who have seen signs posted with limits has increased almost exponentially, I'd say in the last three to five weeks."

Of course his reports have increased exponentially; Mr. Rawls has gotten into the newspapers. People are unable to report data points to agglomerating activity that they do not know exists. Mr. Rawls had to get blog hits from those individuals before he could receive said shortage reports. I’m quite sure reports of Alar Poisoning spiked like the graph of a Dirac Delta Function after Meryl Streep took up the misleading cause.

Such trends normally hold true in the case of blatantly disingenuous Malthusian hype. The modeling trends of Malthus had us all dead decades before the Club of Rome could threaten us once more with a modeled glide path to human extinction. Their pseudo-scientific report “Limits to Growth” is probably mandatory reading before anyone authors a section of the final briefings for an IPCC iteration.

A pessimistic scenario, even of Malthusian Catastrophe proportions, can serve a decision-making organization well. It’s just that most people who write for newspapers don’t report them properly. The Malthusian Case should be on the fringe of a probability distribution. It represents what could happen if everything that could go wrong left on vacation to Hell in a cute, little handbasket.

Gerstein reports this worst case as if it was typical of all America and occurring on daily basis. This smacks of deliberate hype and dishonesty. Reporting that Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson tells the truth about a certain fight, on a certain, given night. A post fight report that Douglas could have whipped Tyson like a chump 99 times out of 100, probably does rough injustice to the truth.

Gerstein’s latest effort displays appalling economic ignorance. I’ve lived under food rationing every single time I’ve gone to a grocery store. I have a budget line. That budget line gets confronted by a price. That budget line divided by the stated price of what I would like to munch on tells me how large of a ration of a given food product I can afford.

Costco faces the same uncertainties, even in the lush environs of Mountain View, California. They would like to stock enough basmati to feed an army of customers in return for adequate remuneration. At the present wholesale price, Costco does not have an infinite budget to fill its entire outstanding order quantity.

Hence, they ration out how many bags of the stuff I can walk into the warehouse and buy out of their high regard for the ten basmati-munchers in line behind me at the checkout counter. This does not constitute the end of life as we know it. Food remains available in modern America to the extent that obesity contributes to a majority of the major chronic health problems that prevail in our nation’s general population.

As for the food-hoarding; I’ve done that ever since I bought my Costco Card. I didn’t sign up for that deal to lose the $50 I shelled out to become a member. If I go to Safeway instead, see packages of processed pasta thingy on sale for $10 for 10 packages, I will habitually get two or three more of them than my family needs for subsistence. I’m hoarding and anyone on SurvivalBlog.com that reads this blog needs to enter another report. I even scare myself sometimes.

In fairness to the earnest and frightened Josh Gerstein, the prices have gotten too high at Costco, Safeway and every other place we go to buy groceries. The everyday rationing mechanism called the supply and demand equilibrium demands more of my wife and I than either of us appreciates. This has been exacerbated by grotesquely bad agricultural and energy legislation in both Dennis Hastert’s and Nancy Pelosi’s poorly executed stewardships over the House of Representatives.

We don’t pay more for our groceries because of any apocalypse. We pay a premium for electing morons to our highest offices. Yet even after bungling Hurricane Katrina’s impact and aftermath; Mayor Nagin has no real problem defending his incumbency. This doesn’t mean we face a disaster. Our electorate just keeps getting the government it deserves; good and hard.