Enjoying that Big Mac? You should. For many years the leading publication on economics, The Economist, has used the relative prices of the Big Mac in whatever currency as a way of discovering the true value ratio between, say, a dollar and a peso. Of course there are many more official and formal ways to do the same thing. Armies of statisticians, flacks and hacks on the payrolls of government and business labor to find those proportions and fortunes are made or lost in the fray. But the Big Mac Index has proven itself among the most accurate measures. Perhaps Numero Uno. Why? Because unlike lira, greenbacks, gold or rare stamps, you can eat a Big Mac and in the end, that is the foundation for all value. Consumption.

According to the patriarch of economics there are only three things in the universe of consumption: necessities, conveniences and amusements. Yes, food is the primary necessity, since air yet flows freely, but necessity isn’t all there is to a Big Mac, self-evidently. “Fast Food” is also known as convenience food. That is they cook it for you, build out a location along your route of travel and pass it to you through your car window. Amusement is a large part of the value as well, of course, even excluding the toys in a Happy Meal. We may relish that Special Sauce but it’s of no benefit beyond that, some will tell you it’s actually harmful but then many amusements are.

It is the same with anything you put into your face today. If you are not a Big Mac man the same principle obtains: you may THINK an organic avocado is a necessity but it is only partly so. The fat margins at Whole Foods are as reliant on the convenience and amusement factors as are the obscene (and expanding) profits of the Golden Arches and both, of course, also spend vast sums convincing their customers there is good return on their money. They are successful at this generally but that is so only at a price level that let’s us indulge our desire for convenience and amusement because necessities are quite cheap.

Now we are warned even by the ghost of Sam Walton to expect higher prices and the only quibble we can make is, hey, where have you been? And just as sure as the Walton Principle that lower prices mean selling more, we know that higher prices mean buying less. Less, less, less, less, less. That is our mantra currently, yes? America did with less through the Depression and then the War, coming out of that there was a great taste for More. The Mad Men taught us to want More, mostly because we already wanted it. And the getting of More has got us in a pickle, us and the rest of the world. Such is the conventional wisdom.

This is America the Ravenous; we have come to our high place because we stand on the heads of the rest of humanity which is more numerous, virtuous and deprived. Deprived by our appetites. We are to restrict our consumption of food, fuels, land… indeed anything that a human could want, because we have so much and all the others, so much less. If America could just share her plate with Sudan the Sudanese would be as cherubic and harmless as so many Hummels. Nothing but our own thick-headedness and greed prevents it from being so. A great project is underway that doesn’t seek to prove if this is true but rather assumes that it is and casts the leveling of America with the rest of the world into a moral crusade which it might well be if the above conceit were true. It is not only untrue but a disastrous and infantile inversion of Reality, which as always, will get her bloody due. Here is the how and the why.

In the fairytale of the Ravenous America, we stand at the top of a broadly based pyramid. It is the same with fuels, furs and any other commodity but let us stick with that primal necessity: food. The class of hedonistic neo-puritans currently calling the shots condemn us for the Big Mac since it is a reckless luxury, the provision of which diverts all sorts of resources that might have gone to feed a Peruvian village of thirty for a day instead of one corpulent Wrestlemania fan for an hour. So can we FedEx the burger to South America and solve that problem for twelve dollars or so? No, that sammich will not make the trip very well and in any case, although it is a calorie-intensive mouthful for one man, however fat, it isn’t going to go very far cut into thirty pieces. What can do that service though, is that little thing called trade. Let us say that, instead of agitating for the importation of Big Macs, our Peruvian friends spent their time and efforts growing potatoes, which they do. The potatoes naturally feed them pretty well, but not well enough. Sure, they can trade potatoes for fish from their own coast and vegetables from their own countrymen but those guys could also be growing potatoes so the transaction is not going to be very profitable. However, get these illiterate peasants a contract to supply McDonalds with fries and well, everything changes, doesn’t it? Though the rate they are paid will seem slight to us, and perhaps also to American potato growers, now these farmers have something called Hard Currency as opposed to the barter coupons that so many foreign currencies amount to. While they still can fill their bellies with their own potatoes now they can also buy things from outside their primitive sphere. The first thing they buy will probably be some advanced seed from that monster of American vulgarity, Monsanto, with which they will then produce MORE potatoes or just produce them more cheaply while they branch into other crops to fill out their own diets, like maybe grapes, which could then be made into ever more valuable products for export and the home market, like wine.

And this is just one thread in the tapestry we call modernity. Consider Kenya. They grow yams and yoruba but export precious little of these necessities as few outside Kenya want them. They consume them at home. But they grow coffee which is neither a food nor a necessity but it is a high value item fulfilling only the desire for amusement that can be sold at exhorbitant profit in the Des Moines airport, which provides the Kenyans dollars that they can use to purchase Iowan corn to feed their pigs or themselves. Or they would do, if we were not converting so much foodstuff into motor fuels and driving up the price.

This is no hypothetical, this is the state of affairs in the world today. Given the trends, it may not be the state of affairs in the world tomorrow because we corpulent fools in monster trucks and mullets will not be consuming so much of anything going forward, at least if the pseudo-moralist plurality in our governing elites has its way. Reality, as is often the case, is a perfect inversion of the moddish image of the trade pyramid that we sit atop like Aztec priests while we cast skulls and chicken bones down: we are actually the base of the pyramid. We support the population of the world in whatever meager elevation they have managed to achieve above the state of nature which is a state of chronic starvation, misery, uncertainty and early death.

Is the foregoing just a self-interested defense of a status quo from which Americans benefit wildly? That is the line. That is the reposte. We shall see as the experiment is ongoing but do not fear for yourselves or your countrymen. While the overgrown populations of the Third World are dependent on modern economics and modern farming for their very existence, whatever is produced by whatever means will still come to America seeking the best prices. If we have to eat more like Mexicans, the prospect holds little dread for Yours Truly and probably not for you either. But it means that the Mexicans will have to eat more like Peruvians. Peruvians more like Guatemalans and the Guatemalans more like Kenyans.

What the Kenyans will do, quite naturally, is starve.

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