Tim Worstall, after thanking all the folks who got him to the point he can be quoted (and quoted accurately) in the Los Angeles Times, realizes that they’re using his words to present a point he isn’t trying to make:
I wrote here about the coming bacon famine. My point was that we’ve just had a bad crop and this requires a modest change in how we use that crop that we do have. We’d rather like people to stop feeding the now in short supply grains to pigs to make bacon and leave rather more of it to be eaten directly by humans. Further, I gloried in the fact that we have a system which achieves this. We have the futures markets: the future price of corn and soy and wheat has gone up. Farmers are culling their pig herds to avoid the future higher costs of feeding them. This will cause a shortage of bacon in the future and if not an excess then certainly more grain than otherwise that can be eaten by humans. I do regard this as a good result, yes. But what I am pointing to is the way in which in a market, price driven, system the entirely selfish pursuit of gelt and pelf, the desire purely for filthy lucre, brings about such a desirable result. The sole desire of agricultural commodity speculators is to increase the amount of cash in their wallets and reduce the amounts in those of other such speculators. Yet from this system we get a rebalancing of the use of a scarce resource which leads to more humans leading longer and better lives even if we’ve a certain shortage of pigs. At which point Hurrah! for capitalism and aren’t we all such lucky people.
[. . .]
Which is indeed what I said. However, we’re then told this:
Worstall doesn’t go so far as to say we should stop eating meat, but his line of thinking is headed in the right direction. If we didn’t use grain as feed for livestock, we could take significant steps toward ending global hunger while also drastically reducing greenhouse gases. Meantime, we’d spare a whole lot of pigs — and maybe even our health.
All of which makes me sound like some kind of hippie, advocating vegetarianism and the equitable distribution of the world’s resources. When what I’m actually applauding is the way in which financial capitalism red in tooth and claw solves our distribution of scarce resources problems.
