One Thing to Keep in Mind. People Have To Eat!

There is a video that was posted on Twitter that I saw the other day. The person talking had what sounded like a British accent.  He moves through the kitchen opening the cabinet and refrigerator doors to show there is plenty of food available in the house. While showing this he expresses his satisfaction that he has enough to last through the pandemic. He moves into the family room and shows a huge television hung on the wall and tells that he has connections to programs like Netflix and other movie channels which he says should make his life comfortable. He as an aside says the electricity is all set.

He then moves into the hallway. He adds that he also has plenty of liquor. He opens the hallway door to show the liquor on a table in there. After showing it to us he swings his camera to continue to show us other things. We get a quick glance at something else in the closet. It is a woman tied to a chair with a gag over her mouth. Obviously the guy narrating the video has broken into the home to ensure for himself that he could survive the upcoming weeks. The homeowner becomes his captive with a very uncertain future.

Hopefully this is not a peek into the future. It does however make me think about what will happen when people can no longer afford to buy food for themselves. The amount of money in a one time payment being begrudgingly delivered to the people by the federal government may provide temporary relief from inability to feed oneself or family as will the $600 unemployment benefits the government will pay in addition to what the states pay for four months. Hopefully these payments will help the folk get through with enough food.

Hunger breeds lawlessness and revolutions. It was one of the prime causes of the French Revolution. The lack of bread and its increasingly high price spread great discontent throughout France.  It gave us the well known, probably apocryphal, anecdote where Queen Marie Antoinette  is told the people have no bread and she replies “let them eat cake!” Speaking of that, have you noticed the high prices the grocery stores are now charging for basic items. Necessary items are no longer on sale.

By the way, and I’d guess a lot of people are sort of confused about this, I’ve read the $1,200 coming to the people is a loan which we have to pay back next year when we file our taxes. It is not income of which a certain percent is taxed, it’s a loan to be paid back in full.

I said begrudgingly because at his Saturday mini-rally Trump expressed his disbelief that people were sitting at home and being paid as if they were going to work. He says our country is not supposed to be like that and we have to get them back to work as soon as we can. That made me conclude that the Republicans will be blocking any additional measures to assist those out of work.

The wisdom of the Democrats in pushing to get relief to the hoi polio will for a while ensure they have enough to eat. But if this menace continues to stalk the land the people will not sit back and starve. Food stores, storage buildings and houses (as shown in the video) will be targeted. Mobs and stay-at-home orders don’t mix.

 

9 Comments

  1. “It gave us the well known, probably apocryphal, anecdote where Queen Marie Antoinette is told the people have no bread and she replies “let them eat cake!””

    She did not say that, but another royal twit 100 years earlier in another country said “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” or “let them eat brioche”. You need to know your artisanal breads (as the Sara Lee commercial appears on the TV that wants you to use their sliced brioche for your sandwiches).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake

  2. “A hungry man is an angry man.

    –Jamiacan saying–

    Fuel for revolution. Bring it on, Glorious Leader. All power to the dialectic.

  3. A BBC report said that there was a four month supply of food at the supermarkets. local distribution centers, regional distribution centers and the manufacturing facilities. Very unlikely we run out of food. 2. Supermarkets probably have higher costs ( salaries, overhead) so they can’t offer sales but the regular prices have not increased. Energy prices have fallen dramatically.. We had a mild winter in the Boston area leading to a one to two thousand dollar reduction in heating bills per household. 3. It is the Socialists dream come true that there will be food shortages and the economy will collapse. Capitalism will have failed and the government led by the Marxists will come to the rescue. That scenario would be a total nightmare for most Americans. As Reagan said government is not the solution to what ails you . Government is the problem.

    • wa-llahi! The capitalism is failing without any help from socialists. Marx, in Kapital, predicted what is happening, and, going to happen, in today’s bourgeois economy. The triumph of socialism is ineluctable.

      NC, why would socialism be such a disaster? Why should the poor die and the rich survive? Who gets a ventilator? Nationalize all private capital. No banksters. No hedge-fund traitors. Eat the rich. There’ll be plenty of money around for improvement of the proletariat, once the bourgeoisie are liquidated.

      All power to the dialectic.

      All praise to the striking grocery delivery folks. All power to the dialectic.

  4. William M. Connolly

    Matt; good story, good points. However, yesterday President Trump said he’d support additional cash for the people. Remember, this, too, it is not the Government giving us money. It is the taxpayers’ money. It is the people’s money that the Government is redistributing.

    One way or another, the taxpayers will have to fork up the cash out of their own pockets to pay off the $trillions the government is spending to get us through this crisis. But we the taxpayer did pay for World War II, and recovered nicely thereafter, so there is hope.

    2. Think of the social, economic and psychological/mental health dislocation if this LOCKDOWN continues. As experts have noted, chronic unemployment leads to stress , marital break-ups, domestic violence, alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness; and stress itself impairs the immune system, and is a factor in heart disease, strokes, etc., and the impoverished generally have higher rates of disease and, perhaps, crime: there may be more burglaries, robberies, or a general uprising, as in the French Revolution, as you suggest. “We’re not going to take it.” Think too of the adverse social-psychological consequences of creating the Microbial-phobic, Fearful Faceless Society.

    On another note: I’ve always maintained that Government Workers (FED, STATE, LOCAL) do not really pay taxes. It seems they do, but what actually happens is the private sector taxpayer gives the government money, let us say $1,000, the Government then gives the government worker $1,000, and the Government worker gives back to the government $200. The Government Worker has not contributed cash; he’s merely received cash from the Private Sector Worker.

    Now we all value the work of government workers and private sector workers, but the reality is the former is paid by the latter. Gladly paid, but always with an eye on bureaucratic bloat. “He governs best who governs least.” The Capitalistic System works best. Let’s hope we come out of this crisis, with a less autocratic government, less socialistic, less bloated bureaucracies, and more free enterprise.

    • Yes, the people will pay (or revolt) but which people-that is always the question. The Deficit Deist Reagan’s “cut” collected the same revenues and drastically shifted who paid them. Probably the greatest transfer of wealth since slavery, reduced the taxes on the wealthy and dropped the onus of the cost of government directly on the soon-to-disappear middle class.

      Trump’s monkey see, monkey do, cuts the taxes of the rich to stimulate an economy that was already over heated. Now he looks in the cupboard and it is just about bare. Print $$ day and night and he still knows what is looming.

    • wa-llahi! The only thing better than being the richest person in the world would be to make everyone’s money worthless. What’s free about enterprise? The market is a fiction. Read about it in your 401k. The old world has passed, Bill. You’re looking backwards. Time for a 180. Think about the future your choices create. There’s no point in bringing back the past. It’s a waste of agency.

  5. You missed the whole joke of the video – One Thing to Keep in Mind. People Have To Eat!