Sunday, January 16, 2011

Fueling The Crisis

Unilever chief warns over global crisis in food output - Telegraph: "In a speech on Tuesday, Paul Polman, the chief executive of Unilever, will say that market distortions created by European Union subsidies work against the needs of the developing world.
He will also demand fewer subsidies for harmful first-generation bio-fuels and say that climate change must be tackled by companies changing to sustainable models of agriculture."
Of course the AGW part is nonsense but he is entirely correct about government planning causing market distortions. If you haven't yet read Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" you need to drop everything and read it right now else you'll just become another fleeced sheep in the next rounds of the (politically generated) "crisis". (Here's a short intro to "Road to Serfdom" and here's the Reader's Digest version [also available here].)