"The Myth of Scarcity"

There is no real scarcity in the world; quite the opposite...Between 1970 and 1990, the population of Canada grew 25% while the GDP expanded 647%. The population of Britain rose 3.2%, while the GDP swelled 964%. In the United States...the population increased 20% while the GDP climbed 440%.3

One might think that such massive increases in wealth...would result in a generous rise in the standard of living, including universal access to medical care...(but) wealth is socially produced but privately owned, so only a privileged elite benefit from rising productivity...The combined wealth of the richest 200 people in the world is close to one trillion dollars...greater than the combined wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population...

Modern Malthusians

The State protects the “right” of the rich to privately own the social wealth and propagates the ideas that justify this arrangement....Since the 18th century, Malthus’ theories have been used to defend social inequality. All social ills, from poverty and disease to famine and environmental degradation, have been mistakenly attributed to the problem of too many people wanting too much.44

Malthus was wrong.

The development of science and technology has made agricultural land so productive that farmers in rich nations are paid not to grow crops while mountains of stored food are destroyed or left to rot every year. The problem is not too many hungry bellies. The problem is that food is sold for profit, and too many people can’t afford to buy it...

Modern Malthusians fill the mainstream media with cries of scarcity. Instead of praising the aging population as a medical and social success, they blame improved longevity for straining the system.... Discussions of what is medically effective are submerged by arguments about money. The myth of “never-ending crisis” is a deception practiced by all nations to promote public acceptance of rationing.45

The myth of scarcity is needed to reconcile the obscenity of growing wealth alongside growing poverty. According to the World Health Organization, around 300 million people live in 16 countries where life expectancy actually decreased between 1975 and 1995. Fifty percent of deaths of children under age five are associated with malnutrition. At least two million child deaths a year could be prevented by existing vaccines and most of the rest could be prevented by access to clean water and other basic necessities. Nearly 1.3 billion people live in absolute poverty, and more than 15 million adults aged 20 to 64 die every year from preventable causes.46

The myth of scarcity insists that such suffering cannot be prevented, because there is not enough to go around. This argument hardens our hearts, erodes our humanity, negates centuries of human progress and reinstates the law of the jungle, where only the strong can hope to survive.

We are expected to accept the unacceptable: beggars in the streets of the world’s most prosperous cities; an abundance of food, while millions starve; treatments for disease that the poor cannot afford; one part of the population being overworked, while the other part is desperate for work; surplus wealth growing alongside, and at the expense of, destitute populations. As American author John Steinbeck wrote in 1939,

“There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success…In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”47

The goal of modern Malthusians is to ensure that the grapes of wrath are never harvested, to justify the dominance of the few and the misery of the many, to obscure what would otherwise be obvious: that ordinary people create all of society’s wealth and deserve their share of it. The elite who rule society can never accept this account of the matter. If they did, they would have to abandon their system of private ownership and competition; they would have to acknowledge the inhumanity of depriving millions to enrich a few. Since they cannot deny reality, they promote the myth of scarcity.48

--Susan Rosenthal (http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x4812203)