Rick Kelo – Eating Like Kings in America

In the United States, consumers secretly control everything. This is a product of our capitalist system where individuals are constantly demanding more and more goods at cheaper and cheaper prices. Talk all you want about politics and the distribution of power, but capitalism runs our country and the leaders of that system are the people with money. One of the effects that this has caused on American society is obesity. While it may not come off as immediately apparent, obesity is a problem in the United States as a result of decreasing prices in food. Over humanity’s entire 200,000-year history, starvation has been the number one killer of humans. However, we now have seemingly more food than ever before, to the point where we are consuming it at unhealthy levels.

In his article, How Capitalism Makes You Fat, economist and financial expert Rick Kelo explains that there isn’t more food than ever before, we have just found ways of producing it more cheaply. “It’s not the glorious provision of nature,” he writes, “it’s more like the glorious division of labor”. For example, when adjusting for inflation, the price of a McDonald’s hamburger has dropped by 32%, and the amount of hamburger you get for that reduced price has doubled. Since the year 2000, Americans have spent less than 10% of our disposable income on food. Before that, food expenditures were in the double digits as far bas as economists have data

In contrast to the abundance caused by capitalism in the Western World, communist countries in the east experienced massive starvation into the modern age. Under Chairman Mao in the late 1950s, 40-70 million people died in China under communist rule, largely as a result of the Great Chinese Famine caused by the country’s efforts to industrialize at all costs. Countries like Laos, India, Vietnam, and North Korea have all experienced some of the worst Global Hunger Index ratings of modern times, and they’re either communist or partially socialist systems.

It is easy to villainize capitalism for it’s seemingly superficial goal of producing wealth. But honestly, are we so evolved as a society that we cannot appreciate that production of wealth is the secret to the vast majority of happiness and comfort we all want on a daily basis? People have to eat, and when you look at the numbers, there is no economic system more bountiful than capitalism. For more information  about Rick Kelo and other economics writings, visit his website.