"If They Be Not Satisfied"

Britons sizzled last week over a 20% government cut in the tiny meat ration. The cut reduces the ration to eightpence (9-c-) worth a week--about one small lamb chop or a matchbox-sized piece of steak. This is an alltime low--less meat than sweat-&-tears Churchill gave them in the worst days of the war.

Despite rising exports, Britain got into this meat hole because of a gimmick beloved of its doctrinaire Socialists, bulk buying. The fact that the government does all Britain's buying of essential foods and many other commodities is supposed to enhance its bargaining power, make imports cheaper for Britain's people. But after Britain became a bulk buyer, Argentina, which supplies 20% of Britain's meat imports, became in self-defense a bulk seller.

The Ministry of Food, dickering for a year's Argentine meat supply, refused nine months ago to pay a -L-5,000,000-a-year increase asked by Argentina. The Labor government called it "blackmail." The Argentines stopped shipping, and meat is piling up in Argentina.

If bulk buying had never been invented, if the old-fashioned pre-Socialist price system were working, there would soon be a way of determining whether Argentina's price was exorbitant. Some private British meat importers would pay the high price in the hope that they could sell at a profit. If they were wrong, Argentina's price would come down.

The Socialist substitute for a free market has no such flexibility. In fact, British Laborites explained last week that if they met the Argentine price, they would have to revise upward their meat contracts with Australia and New Zealand. Government bulk buying, supposed to get cheap meat, was getting close to no meat at all.

London's Liberal News Chronicle pointed out another result of Socialist economies: with the new ration cut, the government is committed to subsidize butchers by an additional -L-20 million ($56 million) yearly so that they can stay in business. Said the News Chronicle: "It will, therefore, cost the taxpayers four times as much not to have meat as it would cost the consumers to have it."

In London's Holborn district, a butcher adorned his empty window with the hand-written text: "Let them wander up and down for meat, and grudge if they be not satisfied. (Psalm 59, Verse 15)."

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