The Numbers

The price of food hasn't stabilized as much as other commodities and a recent report in Canada broadcast on the program "The Fifth Estate" went over the numbers. When you look at the increased cost during and after the pandemic the math isn't adding up when it comes to the final prices ending up on grocery store shelves.

In the US it is no better and the two largest egg producers had not long ago been found to have been colluding on price fixing. Clearly the pandemic offered some of these companies the opportunity to justify price increases under the guise of passing on higher costs of things like fuel and transport. The problem is that only some of that was true.

Increasingly life for the average person is becoming difficult. Wage increases have not kept up with rising costs and people are feeling the pinch. Having one job is sometimes not enough and a couple can no longer dream of the luxury of having only one income earner support to pay for basic needs. Look for YouTube videos for inventive people showing you how they live in their car as a stark reminder that all is not well.

The current capitalism model is a failure for an increasingly large segment of society as the only people advancing are those with enough spare capital to invest in markets that pay them dividends. In other words, the already wealthy are getting wealthier. Greed is most certainly a factor here which is proving itself to be a great miscalculation if one considers the overall health of a society as an important metric.

My children's generation will be worse off than mine was which is not something we planned to happen. It's just that economies as well as empires are cyclical things with their rise and fall as inevitable as death and taxes. Not to mention that far more people in this world than is good for us are short-sighted and greedy idiots.