(Mises)—As a frequent X/Twitter user, I follow a variety of accounts that touch on a number of niches: whether that is economics, finance, Catholicism, college football . . . or in this case, Lord of the Rings. A popular Twitter account that regularly shares content related to J.R.R. Tolkien’s work broke from character to offer an insight on another tweet. In the tweet he refers to, a food inspector is shown interrupting the business of a diner, which the poster laments. Middle-Earth Mixer, the Lord of the Rings account, offers insight:
The problem with Libertarianism is it leans on the old Marxist adage, “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.” Except in this case the idea is, “A few people need to die of food poisoning before we know which diners are good.”
While this may be too much insight for one tweet, I feel it offers a unique question. Is market regulation inferior for relying upon the “breaking of a few eggs?” Are we forced to wait for harm to occur before we act to protect people? Is the government needed to protect people from being poisoned?
Well, first, everyone can acknowledge that poisoning or harming your customers is bad business. The incentive, if one hopes to honestly make a living serving food, is to protect one’s customers, otherwise a reputation will form that will dissuade newer customers. Furthermore, it is not as if one is ever allowed to negligently harm others without restitution. Tort law is almost universally accepted by modern society. If a person or business causes damage to another’s property or their person, they may be held liable even if it is not intentional.
Negligence leads to restitution, thus there is a necessary pressure that pushes restaurant owners to take care and remove possible opportunities for it to occur. Yet, accidents do occur. No business wants to pay for significant harm caused to people because of an accident. Not every business can afford to do so. So how does a business account for this?
Much the same as homeowners, where no one necessarily expects their home to be damaged, insurance provides an opportunity to guard against the worst circumstances. Businesses, like restaurants, have an incentive to be insured against tragic accidents.
On the other side of the transaction, no insurance agency wants to pay out to every business. This is why insurance firms have terms to their agreements. A car insurance company might install a tracker to make sure you stay below certain speeds. It might require maintenance on your vehicle.
Much the same, the insurers of a restaurant may make similar demands: inspections, certain equipment, specific cleanings. All the same requirements without a possibly politically motivated inspector. Political regulation mechanisms fall victim to regulatory capture. Those already established businesses can lobby the regulatory body to favor them over new competitors or increase the cost of compliance. Political favoritism begins to trump true quality control.
Political regulation is subject to problems that market regulation is subject to now. In an insurance model, the insurer is incentivized to maximize revenue through allowing more businesses to be insured and paying out as little as possible, taking measures to minimize risk claims. Thus, the natural market mechanisms will minimize risk of damage.
This is contrary to the government regulatory model. The regulatory model may have requirements and infrequent inspections, but it often falls victim to the very thing thrown into question. Regulatory agencies treat issues in fines. Insurance firms deal in acceptance of payment and promise of coverage. A regulatory agency will often only shut down a firm after its failings—after an accident or negligence has occurred. In many cases, a “few eggs have to break” to deal with problems.
An insurance system is entirely preemptive. An insurance firm does not want to pay out in any circumstances. It will not insure a business that does not meet its requirements. That business will not be able to operate or it will lose everything as a result. An insurance system is not easily bribable, because if it lowers its standards then it will pay out at a massive scale to the barely compliant. Why be a customer at a noninsured business? The insurance system succeeds where regulatory systems fail.
However, there is also a demand-side protection for consumers. Look only at websites like Yelp or reviews on Google Maps. Poor experiences are shared every day, ensuring that customers only visit the highest-quality restaurants. Cleanliness matters to consumers just as much as producers. So, it naturally follows they will demand evidence of cleanliness and safety before they accept food. That is where rating agencies, much like insurance firms, enter to certify cleanliness. Firms, to win concerned consumers over, might pay these rating agencies to review their restaurants.
Of course, they might cheat. The check, however, is that the rating agency may become untrusted and go out of business should it be found out they are deceptive. A regulatory agency like the Food and Drug Administration or United States Department of Agriculture cannot go out of business and as a result fall victim to regulatory capture and corruption.
The market, ultimately, is far more efficient than any regulatory agency in protecting consumers. Agencies that provide information are just as beholden to consumers and consumer safety as the firms they rate. Regulatory agencies lack proper oversight or accountability to provide the same information correctly. Regulatory agencies allow people to be lulled into a false sense of security when there is every reason to doubt the agency itself. It has no reason to operate efficiently or in the light of day. Market mechanisms do not have this defect. They are forced to be vigilant, attentive, efficient, and preemptive. Failures reflect on revenue, and revenue is life in the market.
We need not crack any eggs at all. The market doesn’t ask that of us. Regulatory agencies allow eggs to fall through their fingers, and when the yolk scatters on the floor the hand isn’t punished. The invisible hand of the market is far steadier and safer.
About the Author
David Brady is a Catholic libertarian and economics and finance undergraduate student at Florida Southern College. He is a co-host of the “Every Week is Chaos” podcast and a Mises Apprentice.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Complete BULLTWACKY article!
Silliest, most shallow superficial article conceivable!!!
“The market” —- try the rigged scam, ever since DAVID ROCKEFELLER flew to China in the early 1970s with his minions KISSINGER and NIXON and did THE DEAL with MAO and ZHOU ENLAI!
INSURANCE? Try “unregulated insurance” of the CREDIT DEFAULT SWAP —- perfect GRIFT: the big boys and girls sold billions of them with payouts in the trillions which cannot be covered of course —— so the USD and tax base must cover it – $23 trillion in securtized debt peddled between 1996 to 2006, sold by banks and hedge funds, $23 trillion in assets and equity lost by American, Euro and Asian households between 2007 to 2009!
The Ultimate Scam, the Cosmic Grift! EXAMPLE: John Paulson gets together with the Goldman Sachs grifters who concoct trash CDOs, which are sure to go kaput and trigger the requisite (highly subjective) “credit event” initiating the “insurance” payout — — so for each $1.4 million CDS purchased, Paulson and GS receive $100 million payout — then CFR/WaPo stooge Sebastian Mallaby writes a book extolling the “genius” of Paulson, but the fines levied against Goldman Sachs later by the SEC tell a much different story — — never any retraction by stooge Mallaby, of course! (And how many other entities pulled a similar stunt?! And Jack Lew’s group at Citigroup sold money back–guaranteed CDOs — costing billions to the USG since Citi could never make good on their 100% NONINVESTMENT investment and neither could AIG nor Lehman Brothers nor WaMu nor . . . .)
“The market” . . . . . . .
KEYWORDS: CDS, Blythe Masters, blockchain technology, FS–ISAC, CBDC, Markit (now IHS Markit)