{"id":226,"date":"2005-01-11T15:26:43","date_gmt":"2005-01-11T20:26:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/server97.snhdns.com\/~ravik\/wp\/?p=226"},"modified":"2005-01-11T15:26:43","modified_gmt":"2005-01-11T20:26:43","slug":"how-would-you-do-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200501\/how-would-you-do-it\/","title":{"rendered":"How would you do it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

To all those who are distressed by Yazad’s post<\/a> yesterday defending price gouging, let me propose the following thought experiment. <\/p>\n

Suppose that there is an island which has absolutely no contact at all with the rest of the world. It is usually self-sufficient, but something horrible has happened this year. It has suffered such a bad drought that food production is only 20% of what it was last year.
\n
\nNow, take my word for it that there is absolutely no additional food to be had from anywhere in the short term (i.e. within a year, until the next harvest) As food production is only 20% of last year’s if people tried to eat as much as they did last year, only 20% will have a full meal, while the other 4\/5ths will die. Perhaps you can stretch the food reserves to feed 25 or 30 percent of the people, but there is no way to feed everyone. Any attempt to do so will mean that everyone<\/i> will be malnourished and die by the end of the year. <\/p>\n

Now tell me, what is the
\nCapitalist way<\/b>
\nSocialist way<\/b> and
\nYour way<\/b>
\nto make the best of a bad situation?<\/p>\n

Tell me how your way scores over the other two ways, using whatever criteria you choose to define success.
\nI am giving you fair warning. I am being unfair<\/i> to Socialism. Yes I know that this is an extremely unrealistic situation, and it is unfair to evaluate any<\/i> system on the basis of how well it fixes this problem. I will refine this problem to make it more realistic later based on your responses. But I am telling you that I am being specially unfair to Socialism. Can you tell me why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To all those who are distressed by Yazad’s post yesterday defending price gouging, let me propose the following thought experiment. Suppose that there is an island which has absolutely no contact at all with the rest of the world. It is usually self-sufficient, but something horrible has happened this year. It has suffered such a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}