“Stay in your lane” is a frequently heard refrain nowadays, normally a piece of advice directed at those who, by virtue of some aspect of their identifying characteristics or profession or beliefs, express views which are deemed unwelcome. “Stay in your lane” is not often fair and appropriate advice to be given in debate.
I submit, however, that “Stay in your lane” is usually fair and appropriate advice to give a Marxist who opines on matters which concern the moral, efficient, and effective satisfaction of human wants.
On a recent Saturday morning, with equal parts amusement, frustration, and resignation, I read novelist Sally Rooney’s analysis of an economic situation. Noting Rooney’s position as a self-described Marxist, it was no shock to see her strident call for the government to reinstate an expiring ban on evictions that had been introduced over winter 2022/23 and her proposed solution to housing shortages—the abolition of private property (where that private property is a rental property). The collectivist impulse is strong with Marxists, no matter the costs to humanity. Indeed, some Marxists regarded it as a great loss when the beautiful perpetrators of the Holdomor, that great atrocity, fell from power.
While Marxists might find the inconvenient truths of reality and husbandry hard or unpalatable to grasp, they remain in force as they have done for millennia. Satisfaction of human wants (the end) requires means. Producing means requires time and other goods and resources. Resources that are saved and not consumed allow the production of goods which satisfy the ends. Landlords are people who have husbanded and accumulated their resources and chosen to provide the use of residential property to those (tenants) who do not have the resources to acquire their own for whatever reasons.
Rooney, our Marxist scribe, views such providers of a residential property as mere “middlemen between existing homes and the people who want to live in them.” The value the landlord—the capitalist, the entrepreneur—provides in investing his resources into a home which allows another (the renter) to use that home when he cannot afford or chooses not to purchase one of his own is utterly lost on our Marxist scribe and Marxists generally.
Our Marxist scribe concludes normal people sell their property only when they “judge that the price of an asset has reached its peak.” This is only half right and ignores the question of why so many are choosing to do so at the same time. More accurately, people sell their property when the expected future benefits of holding fall below those of selling now.
Private landlords look up and see a future of ill-informed, shortsighted invective fueled by a tidal wave of political opportunism, economic illiteracy, and envy, with the sole effect (if not aim and objective) of making it unfeasible to be a private landlord. An Irish landlord already knows that rents can’t be adjusted to account for inflation and interest rate rises.
Landlords see legislators proposing that “no fault evictions” be outlawed (i.e., the landlord’s ability to regain access to their property is to be seriously curtailed and possible only on very limited and prescribed grounds). They see proposals that all sales of rental property must leave the tenants in situ, often at rents far below the prevailing market, which in turn depresses the prices they could receive from a future purchaser. They see proposals to give tenants a first option to buy when a landlord wishes to sell (and it is extremely unlikely that the tenant will be required to be the highest bidder).
Landlords know the system is loaded against them if a tenant decides to stop paying rent. In consequence, landlords are necessarily deciding either to sell up or never become landlords to begin with. I have covered the causes and effects of the shortfall in Irish housing stock and rent control previously.
No matter. Our Marxist scribe asserts there is a fixed stock of property that either exists now or which will be built in the future, and this can only house so many people—be they owners or renters. This is a grotesquely simple and very Marxist assertion. Each and every housing intervention, restriction, and control that has been introduced and argued for by the Left has the effect of limiting the supply of housing stock—and consequently pushing rents up. Marxists never consider how individuals will change their behavior and choices when faced with such restrictions and invariably fail to heed the parable of the broken window. Supply lost due to disincentivizing the production of that supply is invisible to them, and the knock-on effects of reduced supply elude them entirely.
Our Marxist scribe’s piece merely proves the truth of Thomas Sowell’s famous observation, “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.” Rooney opines, “Why would the government lift the ban? It’s so unpopular! They can only be trying to curry favor with private landlords to win their votes.” She clearly sees everything through the lens of what is quick, easy, expedient, and popular. In the case of our Marxist scribe, the long-term solution is obvious: the state should acquire any properties owned by the “exploitative” private landlords. There must be no private ownership of rental properties. The state can provide rental accommodation, and at far cheaper rents!
“Free” lunches, such as heavily subsidized rents, are always popular with Marxists and those who are either unable or unwilling to consider where the resources to provide the lunches come from and the implications of appropriating or diverting those resources from other uses. Alas, nothing is ever free; somebody, somewhere, will be forced to bear the costs, and they will do their utmost, as is their right as a sovereign individual, to avoid those costs. The state, described by Frédéric Bastiat as “that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else,” can only plunder resources from taxpayers (current ones through taxation or future ones through borrowing) or from the population as a whole via inflation and then redistribute them, badly.
At least, I trust, Rooney—as a self-described Marxist—does not avail herself of the Irish income tax code’s artist’s exemption. No good Marxist would deny the state tax revenue, of course.
Our Marxist scribe is indeed a novelist whose currency is in the realm of fiction and fantasy, and her forays into the world of reality and logical analysis fall flat. She should stay in her lane. However, it is not her profession as a novelist which suggests she should do so, but rather, it is her Marxism.
About the Author
James Murphy, CFA FRM BA MBS BL is an experienced financial services professional with over 25 years of experience in the banking, finance and hedge fund industry with interests in finance, economics, law, history and politics and the interplay between these fields.
Article cross-posted from Mises.
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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.