Disturbing opinion poll findings about coronavirus

The Sunday Times uncovers something most disturbing:

By a margin of 52% to 26%, people say the government should declare a state of emergency; 63% support the introduction of food rationing, according to the YouGov survey for The Sunday Times.

It’s the 63% supporting food rationing that worries. Clearly, large numbers of people are less than fully informed.

Of course, if people mean that they want the Commissars to start insisting that each prole may only have one can of beans at a time then that’s alarming nonsense. That only 37% are against such is worrying.

But much worse is to take a step back from that and ponder the idea that 63% of the population don’t seem to understand that we’ve already got a method of food rationing. It’s called the price system. The important part here being that this idea that people front up their own resources in exchange for those of others is the only one that has proven to work. We’ve many thousands of years of experience of this too, everything from Diocletian’s price controls causing local famines through to observing Venezuelan weight loss plans under Maduro.

We have rationing, it works, why would we want to change that?