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Its interesting to note that the basis of a modern rationing system would be a secure, authenticated nation ID card system...
This has been noted before in discussions about the proposed UK ID system. Coming soon.
It WILL come to this. - And is a perfect means of societal control.
No ID? - no food.
And more.
If you maintain a large information database on everyone in the country you can determine what they NEED as opposed to want. Piece of cake, only 60million records. No need for a Granny who does 2,000 miles a year to have the same fuel ration as a family man. Keep her ration at 2,000 miles worth for her car and put his at 9,000 miles worth for his. Personalised rations mean no trading on of rations you don't need for things you do.
Hmm, maybe it IS a good idea to use lot now to ensure you keep improved rights to it later. This is good civil service thinking, spend it all this year or you will only get less next time.
If you maintain a large information database on everyone in the country you can determine what they NEED as opposed to want.
Sound like central planning all over again. A tax is much more efficient in that the price system can restrict and allocate resources in a much more dynamic fashion. After all how much gasoline do you give to 100 different factory that makes 100 different chemicals and parts used in various vital industrial process that you as a central planner know nothing about? If the railroad is shipping shoes does it get more gasoline than if it is shipping plastic widgets used in 30 different sub-assemblies of industrial machines that are used to produce other vital goods? The price system figures this all out automatically. This is why the centrally planned economies could never keep up with the west.
Of course, as long as you get your ration and you get to eat you're fine and you'll defend the system to the death because it's where your food comes from.
Unfortunately its one of those myths of a growth economy that a 'free market' is more efficient. Its not. Its just a good way of playing an evolution game on a grand scale, focused around the single core concept of growth and money as a god. Take other measures and its not very efficient or optimum; tax being one of its simplistic minions of control.
It doesn't take long to realise if that god is dethroned, its minion isn't likely to the best choice for the long term either.
It was once said that the chief problem of the old soviet union was that it was born too early. Born today instead and it would be possible to model and deal with the full complexity of the whole economy, top to bottom.
While you can shudder at bureaucrats having those levers, what it does provide for is large scale optimisation around other factors than money. That after all is the purpose of rationing in the first place. The flexibility to shape an economy around other factors means that to a greater or lesser extent it will be tried as its obvious growth can no longer be the thing to lead the direction of the country.
The alternative is for those large scale entities to dissolve.
I would say that a "free market" pricing system is of course inherently more efficient, for all the reasons outlined above.
However, you need a strong central government to enforce that freedom and to create the conditions that make possible the efficiencies that a market economy can provide. If, as in the U.S. and many other places, the government surrenders the control of the free market system to the large actors in the system... they will act rapidly and forcefully to destroy the price signaling system that creates the efficiencies that justify such a system. They will behave like monopolists and monopsonists.
"Free market" advocates usually forget that someone has to set up the stalls, collect the garbage, create/maintain a currency of exchange, and define the rules of fair competition... and that someone had better not be the most powerful player in the market or the market itself quickly disappears. Market creation is an essential role for a large limited power... like a democratically elected government.
The free market is inherently a competition. In a competition there must be winners and losers. The loser is wasted effort, time, resources, money.
What the free market brings is evolution and the distributed ability to explore every niche. But that is funded, and is at the cost of 'efficiency'. Free markets are not efficient, they are essentially blind evolution machines.
As you realise, evolution can be incredibly 'effective' and what is arrived at can eventually be more efficient than a designed mechanism. However they cost in the meantime and can be slow. Its by no means certain that they would be the best approach in a time of decline where attention was placed on things other than money.
As I said, that's the what and why of rationing, and why it gets used at times of limitation.
However, you need a strong central government to enforce that freedom and to create the conditions that make possible the efficiencies that a market economy can provide.
Strong government or working courts?
What is usually lacking in these discussions is the realization that the government is only a subordinate part of the ruling class in a society. If you have a capitalist economy, the capitalists will run the society; after all, they control jobs, finance, education, the media, the election campaigns, etc., etc.. And capitalists will, indeed they must, put the pursuit of profits (to create more capital) ahead the common good (although the two may happen to coincide at times).
In a capitalist society, there cannot be real democracy, since the capitalist ruling class will never allow anything that seriously goes against their basic interests. They will sometimes have to make concessions to the people, because that's where their wealth comes from. Many of the commenters here admit that there must be a lot of planning in a postpeak world to avoid total chaos, but I would submit that the capitalists cannot be trusted to do it for the common good, and the people do not have the power to make them do it. Look at the wonderful democracy we have in the U.S. right now! Government of the people, right? People have to take power and run the government and the economy, and one of our biggest jobs is to educate them to make that possible. (How? Go back and read the Declaration of Independence.) It may even have to be an authoritarian democracy led by scientists and engineers who know what the score is. Impossible? Maybe so, and maybe civilization itself is impossible, too.
Indeed.
"However, you need a strong central government to enforce that freedom and to create the conditions that make possible the efficiencies that a market economy can provide."
Didn't the founding fathers in the US advocate a weak central government and strong local government? That of course has now been eroded...
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
"Didn't the founding fathers in the US advocate a weak central government and strong local government? That of course has now been eroded..."
Yes they did, and we will eventually return to it.
A tax is much more efficient in that the price system can restrict and allocate resources in a much more dynamic fashion. After all how much gasoline do you give to 100 different factory that makes 100 different chemicals and parts used in various vital industrial process that you as a central planner know nothing about?
Any honest economist will tell you that while a competitive market can be efficient*, it doesn't deal with equity at all. A politician in a democracy must be concerned at least somewhat with equitable outcomes -- not too many people must be allowed to fall too far behind. A rationing system can cap the total consumption of gasoline, while still allowing, for example, the working poor or people in rural areas where driving distances are longer to get their few gallons per week. The alternative of, say, gasoline at $20/gal, would not be noticed by Paris Hilton as she drove from club to club, but would force millions of the working poor to quit their jobs, since they simply couldn't afford the gas needed to get there. If rations can be sold, Paris will still get to the clubs, and still pay the high price, but not by pricing a large number of people out of the market entirely.
*When you take graduate-level economics, the micro class spends less than a week proving that a competitive market can produce optimal results, then spends several weeks covering all the ways that the assumptions needed for that proof can fail.
My point is is that when goods are used for their own sake, for consumption, by Paris Hilton or Granny it's easy to divide up the goods evenly. What about though when goods are used to create other goods? For instance what parts should a factory produce? What goods should a freight railroad be used to transport? How many bulldozers should be produced? Multiply that by the complexity of a modern economy and it becomes very easy to make errors and be overwhelmed no matter how moral and well meaning the planners are. Of course in the capitalist system money is used and cost accounting are used to determine all this. Which is why the mechanism for the creation of money is a very very important issue that gets far less attention than it should.
Yes,
there are lots of things you can do with ID cards and the follow-on Ration Cards, both for food and carbon rations and all sorts of other measures.
And the greatest beauty of all is crushing dissent:
No ID Card and you immediately become stateless, a non person. And since the Government issue the card, which remains the property of the State, then the holder of the card becomes...the property of the State.
(BTW as free born Englishman, I am opposed to them, but as a grim realist I know they are coming).
Labour are pushing ahead with them. They call them 'entitlement cards' . This fits neatly with the highly successful world wide con of renaming Citizens as 'Consumers'.
Initially, they will be voluntary.
That will last about two days, when immediately, opening a bank account, or entering a government building, or opening a utility account or getting hospital treatment suddenly requires the presentation of your 'entitlement card'.
No card? - no entitlement.
No card? - no access.
The Tories say they will scrap them if they get in power. This is disingenuous: A) The Tories will find them as equally useful as will Labour (or any other Government) and B) The European Union want then throughout Europe.
We increasingly live in a world where we are to become worker-slaves. A world where ration control of sufficient calories to allow us to work (but not much else) will be the norm. The coming debt - servitude, or indenture; possibly even inherited debt-servitude are almost within reach of the elite now.
At some point after the Second World War, the elite of each nation realised that they actually had more in common with each other than they had with the common ruck of their own nations. At this point, globalisation was offered to the hoi-poloi of each nation as a panacea to world problems and world wars etc.
There are two real nations in the world now.
The Elite
and
The Helots.
Already, it has been mooted that the 'Great and Good' will have their personal data for the up and coming UK ID Card scheme held on a separate data-base...
PS:
And by the way, there will be no place for the middle class in this brave new world.
The Elite - Helot feudal model is perfectly acceptable and pleasant to the Elite.
The evolution of the middle classes, begining as Craft-Guilds in Medieval Cities, and rural Yeoman farmers through to the religious dissenters and recusants of the Renaissance in Northern Europe have always been a pain in the arse for the elite.
People who believe in educating children, getting on, reading books and pamphlets, agitating for a fair share, agitating for the vote are really not required in this new planetary business model.
The Middle Class created lots of troublesome events for the Elite:
English Civil War
Scottish Enlightenment
French Revolution
American Revolution
The repeal of rotten boroughs and Parliamentary Representation of industrial cities
1848
The Russian Revolution.
Poland
If you are in the Elite , why would you let these educated, sassy creatures thrive, when all you really need are 'bent backs' in the potato, cotton and bio-diesel fields...
Lawyers? Dont need Lawyers. If you are the Elite, you ARE the Law.
You might like to consider your list for the average lifespan of any 'elite' group that tries the model. Its usually about 2 weeks longer than the time it takes for people to realise they are on the bottom, their life is getting worse, and there really aren't that many of 'them'.
Not saying someone won't try it, but in the situation of a general decline in circumstances its not a stable approach or a particularly survivable one for those in control.
Playing silly dictator b*ggers is a good way of separating your head from your neck.
It depends...:-)
On your level of total control.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article602888.ece
From The Times
October 17, 2006
The future ascent (and descent) of man
Within 100,000 years the divide between rich and poor could lead to two human sub-species
By Mark Henderson, Science Editor
The mating preferences of the rich, highly educated and well-nourished could ultimately drive their separation into a genetically distinct group that no longer interbreeds with less fortunate human beings, according to Oliver Curry.
Dr Curry, a research associate in the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science of the London School of Economics, speculated that privileged humans might over tens of thousands of years evolve into a “gracile” subspecies, tall, thin, symmetrical, intelligent and creative. The rest would be shorter and stockier, with asymmetric features and lower intelligence
Eloi vs Morlock, Elite vs Helot.
The distinctive physical features may take a wee while, but the cultural separation could occur within a generation, especially with the help of prozac and the like.
Remember, the Eloi were cultivated for the Morlock gourmet palate.
Let them eat cake.
Let them burn perfume.
| The problem will solve itself.
| But not in a nice way.
"Playing silly dictator b*ggers is a good way of separating your head from your neck."
Those North Korean and Burmese thugocrats are 'heading' straight towards the revolutionary guillotine, Real Soon Now.
Right?
Right?
Bueller?
Anyone?
While in the US, we seem to be moving to a "caste system" of all are equal, but some more equal than others:
Feds strike ID deal over NY licenses
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071027/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/immigrant_driver_s...
Hello Mudlogger,
"As a free-born Englishman"??? Are you sure about this? Last I checked Englishmen were not free-born. They are subjects of the Queen by birth and inhabitants of a country which admits no constitution that guarantees them any rights. Unless, of course, you count the Magna Carta which grants you principally three rights -
1) your freedom to belong to the Church of England (but no other religion)
2) ''all the liberties and customs" of the "City of London and all other Boroughts and Ports". Hell knows what this means, but I wouldn't like to be basing a court case on it.
3) Habeas Corpus - the right of any Freeman not be to "condemned or imprisoned" but by "lawful judgement of his peers". Suspended for the first time by the UK government during the Northern Ireland 'Troubles" of the 1970s and also the recent move by Gordon Brown to institute 56 day detention without trial for people suspected of 'terrorism'.
Don't get me weong - I live in England (London) and know all its charms as well as its deficiencies.......
Cuchulainn
Heck...screw the ID card...just put a barcode on our forehead or a microchip in our buttocks at birth!! Who will need another card again in our life? All credit deducted from our centralized monetary account. All personal information loaded (Social Security #, height, weight, parents, etc.) All locations travelled past scanner checkpoints.
This reminds me of some article I once read stating that barcodes on our arms for this purpose would be the arrival of the "sign of the beast".
Actually the ID card will have an RFID chip in it. Comes out May 2008 in the US. That chip can also be put in a grain of rice sized plastic case and injected under the skin.
The microchip can be initialized at minus forty-five thousand dollars, to reflect your share of the public debt. (or whatever your share is)
"No ID Card and you immediately become stateless, a non person. And since the Government issue the card, which remains the property of the State, then the holder of the card becomes...the property of the State."
What do you think we have now?
If you don't have a passport you cannot leave your country or enter another one.
If you don't have a state issued driver's licence you cannot use state owned roads, and if you offend your vehicle can be taken by the state.
When you are born you are given a birth certificate, without which you can't function in the bureaucracy of society.
And so it goes...
We only need those IDs because the state says so. Their necessity is simply to track people, regulate, prosecute, etc... The new ID Card schemes are just a way to increase that control.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
I will refuse an ID card as long as feasibly possible. NO ID card, No control over me. Hopefully a subculture will exist to circumvent the "system".
http://www.nonationalid.com/
French Revolution/Bastille day ring a bell?
I'm sure there will be a healthy underground/blackmarket business for hackers and forgers that can trick or otherwise falsify the information on the chip/barcodes.
The hatred of illegal immigrants will be used to win over the last redneck opposition to national ID cards. They want to bring back Jim Crow, and they can't use skin color for that purpose any more. So the ID card will be the surrogate skin.
If you don't have a state issued driver's licence you cannot use state owned roads,
I do not believe bicyclists need a license for the roads.
And the state has a 'not a drivers license card' - for all that pesky IDing needs you may have.
Indeed! About 20 years ago or so we had a drought in Northern California, and the city of San Francisco rationed water based upon a percentage of use the previous several years, so anybody who had been careful using it (lessons learned from earlier droughts) was "punished" whereas folks who wasted water at will the previous 3 years or so had higher quotas.
Our Future = 1984 + Mad Max + Soylent Green
"What is Soylent Green" :P
Soylent Green
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone