What if a drought hits, like the last link in thefadd's wonderful writeup implies? All the midnight trains going anywhere won't help at that point.

so you're saying that a worldwide drought could eliminate all the world's food supplies... that would hurt us bad, not just us but every living thing on the planet (with the possible exception of the ocean's creatures). If the drought doesn't last long (as in years) one solution would be slaughtering the majority of our herds. More meat and less grain in our diets, also a much smaller drain on available water supplies which could help. Since fish stocks are nearly gone we don't really have the option to switch to another food source, all we could do is manage what we do have. Of course, food would be the least of our concerns as water is already hard to find and much less portable than foodstuff so in the case of such a drought so severe that our food supplies were compromised the first thing we'd have to worry about would be new water sources (whether they be new aquifers or mass desalination projects).

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We're already in this situation in significant part because of persistent droughts in Australia and China which are associated with a very large la Nina of a type typically seen every only every fifteen years or so.  There's a still scientific disagreement as to whether this kind of weather pattern will become more more common with global climate change, which means we can't really count on having the climate we've been accustomed to.

Worldwide grain output has been rising steadily over the long term, but has over the past decade or so been rising slower than population growth.  Add in people in China eating more meat because they can now afford it and biofuels and it puts is in a shortage situation which would see rising prices even without the droughts.

a true shortasge is when there isn;t enough to go around.. not when the surplus lowers to the point where it starts affecting prices... the fact that there are prices for food is the first problem.

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a true shortasge is when there isn;t enough to go around.. not when the surplus lowers to the point where it starts affecting prices... the fact that there are prices for food is the first problem.

But unless they hand out coupon books and ration cards there always will be a price associated. If they can only feed 50% of the world's population due to a grain shortage I would be the price would skyrocket. Perhaps price is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself?

No the problem really is that food has a price rather than being regarded as a human right.

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Then how do they compensate the farmers who make it, truckers who ship it, merchants who sell it?
What about health care? Surely everybody should have the right to go to the doctor anytime they want without charge. Tough for the MD and his staff, they went to college and took on those loans for nothing. What about drugs? What about the scientists who designed them and his family? What about a house? Everybody should be entitled to a house (and a car) to let their kids run around. Right?

Why deny anybody anything?

If you start down that path then we end up with communism or something, which would be a bad thing.

compensate the farmers?!?!? you got it all wrong.. the farmers have to compensate to every single living being on the planet for taking away land from them. It's not like land can belong to anyone, right?

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Your right. Possessions and land belong to the strongest.

Hey, party at your house tonight, right? We can crash it because we feel like it?

The strongest? You'd make a good fascist (or Republican) I guess.. I believe that land belongs to everyone not some select few (no matter how they are chosen it is still theft... even if the land is 'developped' and 'worked' within a family... that family is stealing that land form everyone else). Every square foot of privately owned land is an affront to the concept of freedom and to look at it any other way devalues our own rights as people.

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Wow.

So how are we supposed to decide who gets to work the land? Why should a farmer plant crops if somebody else can waltz in and say, hey, I am going to appropriate it for my own needs?

Are you suggesting some kind of global communist collective?

That's the whole point.. no one should be able to appropriate any land and there should be no one to appropriate it from.

If you think a global communist collective would work, then that would be the direction we should be aiming for. I'm really kind of fuzzy on those details (I know there are solutions that would work but I'm not really championing any single one of them), I just know that it's the only fair way (I guess a compromise could be the fair compensation to the global population by land owners but I doubt that landowners would be able to survive financialy while paying a fair share).

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The US welfare state is a blatant failure. It has created of generations of people who have no interest in anything other than just taking what they can get for free.

I shudder to imagine what would happen if we went from a system where a portion of people's income is removed to subsidize the lifestyles of other able bodied people to a system where property rights are completely abolished.

property rights are completely abolished? I'm not talking about taking away your damn tv...

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You can take my TV, I don't care. :)

But seriously, what happens when we abolish land rights? People who own houses could be forced out, businesses who invested in a location ejected. It wouldn't make sense and would cause complete chaos.

well since the first part of the plan is to put all the capitalists to the sword.... I'm just joking there, the point I was making was about how the world should work in a fair way (in that the system itself doesn't cause starvation for profit) not how to transition towards a proposed replacement system. If you wanted a more orderly changeover then I guess you could convert deeds into X year leases... but the point isn't to evict people, it's to get those who 'own' land to pay a fair rent to its real owners, the entire population. Actually, more to the point, it's to allow all the people to be fed by a world more than big enough for us all.

Two points I think I should bring up:

1. How can you really own something that you can't move through any means? Doesn't it more or less own you?

2. The land renews itself every year, wouldn't it be appropriate to have to purchase the rights to each year rather than own in perpetuity?

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Such a system worked wonders in Zimbabwe.

I'm sorry but how in the world does that have anything to do with what I've been saying? I don't remember ever suggesting that land should be seized and then allotted to people unskilled in farming, but if I did, please enlighten me.

That would also be counter-productive as the goal is to feed everyone, land reform is just a means to that end. I envision something more akin to a land tax where the amount paid is based on the size and suitability of the land for agriculture. Therefore an area of land that is some rocky mountain better used for a ski hill would have a negligable 'food' tax to pay when compared to say an office tower built on arable land while farmers would be able to pay the 'food' tax directly rather than having to pay the tax monetarily (it should be cheaper to pay with grain itself than have to purchase it from a farmer or marketing board). Essentially I'm arguing for something akin to carbon trading (as proposed as a method to deal with global warming) where people have to offset their land use by providing others with the produce that their land could produce and would otherwise be feeding the hungry masses.

As I said, I'm opposed to the idea of private ownership of land but mainly because of the social chaos it causes,  my suggestion above would seem to be suitable compensation for allowing private use of something that is an obviously shared resource.

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