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… is from page 477 of the 5th edition (2015) of Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics [2]:
The last thing needed when real national income is going down is a policy that makes it go down faster, by denying consumers the benefits of being able to buy what they want at the lowest price available.
Indeed so. And yet Trump, Sanders, and Clinton each endorses such a policy.
Suppose that massive atomic warfare so destroys food supplies and food-supply lines that the vast majority of Americans, in order to stay alive, return to subsistence agriculture – growing the likes of tomatoes and beets and peas in on their land, as well as raising at home, for home consumption, chickens and pigs. (Locavores cheer!) From time to time a squirrel or rabbit – or, for the unusually fortunate families, a deer – scurrying across the yard is shot to supplement the evening’s meager meal. This atomic-warfare destruction, in other words, creates tens of millions of agricultural jobs by vastly increasing the relative wages (pay) of subsistence agricultural work. Jobs once abundant in America return!
Messrs. Trump and Sanders – if they really believe and understand the logic of the ‘economics’ that they routinely spew – should applaud these economic consequences of atomic warfare. Ditto Ms. Clinton, despite the skilled, cynical hemming-and-hawing that she does before endorsing trade restrictions. Each of these people, and each of their panting fans and apologists, believes that to artificially create greater scarcity is to create greater prosperity.