This great article by Eamonn Butler documents the fall of the Roman empire largely caused by the inflation and price controls that became yokes hoisted upon the citizenry.
But, as you read it, recall the beginning in which he explains the root cause of it all, agricultural subsidies.
Throughout history there have been numerous examples of governments taking over the grain trade and disrupting markets with price controls to maintain monopolies. This eventually leads to the debasing of the currency. In the Roman times, silver currency morphed into copper coins with tin coating, and the result was what one coin used to buy, now it took thousands. Does this sound familiarly corny?
In America, we have agricultural subsidies that favor grains and corn. True competition with grass fed meat and fresh fruit and vegetables is not a reality. Our pocket books tell us to buy the cheaper and higher calorie foods. However, the subsidies were paid for by our taxes, so in essence the cheaper grains have a hidden cost that aren’t in the price tag.
With what money are we paying for the porky agricultural subsidies here in the US? The answer is we’re printing more and more wooden nickels (a nickel is about what the dollar is worth 80 years ago).
We use these wooden nickels to pay for artificially cheap (for now) crops.
These crops are causing us to acquire Metabolic Syndrome on a level never seen before in human history. Grains are not really that cheap, and the long-term health care costs and worse quality of life with poor health just don’t add up.
Roman meal, indeed. 
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 11:33 pm and is filed under Granary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
[...] In the same way that it retards markets, the State has retarded the family tribal unit… so maybe these flags and banners don’t represent the tribes we think that they do… maybe if we were more tribal (e.g., putting the interests of our families first) there would actually be more peace. The only way to put your family first is to cooperate with all of the families around you at city, county, state levels… and there really doesn’t have to be State guided discipline to do that… International trade regulated is really a backbone for a club that hopes to monopolize the touch points between us simple folks, the simple folks who just want to trade apples for oranges across the border. [...]
[...] The Paleo Post may be found in the left hand column of The Paleo Garden’s main page. The surprise of the week is to find the Washington Post even publishing the links between ag subsidies of cheap carbs with the health crisis in America, a subject we recently covered. [...]
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[...] My article “Fiat Money, Food, and Health All Go Bust” was published on the premiere libertarian website in the world carrying on the legacy and ideas of the great Austrian economists like Mises and Hayek. I have written elsewhere about the common principles between Austrian economic thought and biological systems that cooperate together to perform various actions. The Paleo Path, Part I and Part II. Wooden Nickels and Metabolic Syndrome. [...]