Dude, where's my shrimp?

This past weekend I presented a paper at the Eastern Economics Association conference in New York. I had invited all my King's College students to attend the meetings and learn from the latest research in the field. Naïvely, I also had promised them jumbo shrimp, chocolate-covered strawberries, and exotic meats and cheeses during the presidential reception. The usual annual perks of laboring in academia.

Imagine our faces when the only snacks served were pretzels and potato chips. In my righteous indignation I was ready to accuse the treasurer of embezzlement. After all, the price of shrimp has not changed that much in a year while we pay the same membership and conference fees. It reminded me of socialist Bulgaria where the peasants raised the hogs, the party leaders ate the ham steaks, and everyone else waited in long lines for hot dogs made from the unmentionable leftovers.

And then it hit me. We are in a recession. I remembered how, just before he moved out of the Oval Office, then-President Bush sent as a farewell gift the shrimp and strawberries to his reckless banker friends. And I realized that a few days ago, responding to the nation's hope for change, President Obama had claimed the meat and cheese for the reckless borrowers who elected him spender-in-chief.

Newly hatched Keynesians gloomily pondering the possibility of a decade of slow recovery surrounded the cash bar. I asked one of the veterans of the interventionist movement about the sources of his pessimism. He pointed to the Great Depression. Wasn't that the first recession when the government decided that it was up to them to fix the market? Why do we want to replicate the experiment of state capitalism decades after it failed under Hitler and FDR? Yes, it works if all we need is guns but now I want my shrimp.

Suddenly I saw a group of smiling faces. As I approached I recognized several members of the Union for Radical Political Economics. No wonder they looked happy---the leader of the Free World has dismissed free market ideology as anachronism. Now they wait for the new interventionist program to fully discredit capitalism. When the plan to save the current system sufficiently exacerbates the conditions of the masses, it will be the radicals' turn to come to the rescue with some vision of socialism---democratic or otherwise---and a promise of shrimp in every pot.

P.S. For a Marxist analysis of the crises, click here.