(Mises)—Several months ago, I was on a long car trip with my dad, and we listened to a podcast that gave some commentary on the following headlines from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal: “AI Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn” and “AI Poses ‘Risk of Extinction’ on Par with Pandemics and Nuclear War, Tech Executives Warn.”
Obviously, this was in the wake of new AI technologies like ChatGPT and others. This is also not a new issue. In 2017, the Wall Street Journal also published “Protecting Against AI’s Existential Threat.” Of course, AI has been impressively more developed recently, bringing the usual reactions—assumptions that this technology will totally change everything, amused interest, reasonable concerns (e.g., students cheating), and the typical hand-wringing.
All this was in response to a recent statement from the Center for AI Safety, who posted an open letter with the following warning: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” As these claims were made, even by creators of the technologies, I had a sneaking suspicion that I already knew what these AI companies wanted: cronyism. Not long after that, my suspicions were confirmed by the inevitable call for that one, vague, seemingly magical word that everybody seems to demand in situations like these. That word is “regulation.”
Arguing a similar point soon after the announcement of this “existential threat,” another writer from the Wall Street Journal perceptively wrote an article titled, “AI is the Technocratic Elite’s New Excuse for a Power Grab.” That said, while there is certainly a penchant for the technocratic elite to form and expand bureaucracies in order to regulate, it is worth mentioning that very often these very companies are themselves the biggest proponents of government regulation of their industries.
Why would private firms ever want cumbersome government regulation? The answer is cronyism. Cronyism, crony capitalism, “crapitalism,” corporatism, managed capitalism, a “mixed” economy, or fascism are different titles for the same concept. Whatever the designation, it is a public-private partnership that employs the powers of the state to grant special legal privilege to non-State entities for their mutual benefit at the expense of the consumer/taxpayer.
Private businesses and government are often not enemies but very comfortable friends. More than that, their working together is always in the name of protecting the consumer/taxpayer. Depending on their ideology, people might see themselves teaming up with business against the government or teaming up with government against business, but they rarely recognize that there is a third option—government and business teaming up against the consumer/taxpayer.
By inviting “regulation,” private firms can use the legal apparatus of the government to limit competition, raise barriers to entry for competitors, restrict output for higher prices, and shift the costs of “health and safety” standards to the taxpayers. These are options that businesses and industries would never have save an alliance with the state. The taxpayers will pay the government, via bureaucratic agencies, to inspect and maintain certain standards for businesses, which removes the costs of these standards from the business, subsidizes their operations, and places them on the taxpayer. Oddly enough, this regulative bureaucratic apparatus can simultaneously be burdensome by hampering the productive aspects of a business, assistive in providing for costs to businesses and industries that they would otherwise have to bear, and incompetent in the goal of protecting consumers.
A costly regulatory burden for competitors, an attempt to capture the market, movement toward monopolization, the government as enforcer, and getting the consumer/taxpayer to pay for bureaucracies to write more regulations and inspect standards: What business wouldn’t at least be tempted?
Cronyism has a long history. In fact, monopoly used to mean exclusive legal grants of government privilege to certain companies, not arbitrary standards like firm size, number of firms, or market share. Cronyism has also had a long history in the United States, especially since the Progressive era (ca. 1890–1920). We are often told that the Progressive era involved the government intervening to stop monopoly when the truth is precisely the opposite—the government intervened with a new bureaucratic technocracy, usually at the request of private firms, to stifle competition and impose monopoly.
This took place in all sorts of areas, such as meatpacking, insurance, textiles, money and banking, etc. It turned out, according to G. Edward Griffin, that use of the word “reform” would be enough: “The American people are suckers for the word ‘reform.’ You just put that into any corrupt piece of legislation, call it ‘reform’ and people say ‘Oh, I’m all for “reform,”’ and so they vote for it or accept it.”
Furthermore, while the tendency in America was toward competition, this was unacceptable to many businesses who invited and embraced new “regulations” and “reforms.” Writes historian Gabriel Kolko, “Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.” The simple solution was, “Monopoly could be put over in the name of opposition to monopoly!” The same word was used, but the content could be the opposite. Government, itself a monopoly, was to monopolize industries because, if it didn’t, monopolies might result!Many vaguely call for “regulation” because they may not know what else to ask for whenever they see a problem, but often businesses call for it to use the governmental apparatus to their benefit at the expense of the consumer/taxpayer.
As the new and growing AI industry develops, it should be no surprise that they want “regulation.” It is probably not that they really believe that the AI technology they produce is a literal threat to human existence, but that, by leaning into the scaremongering and the statist non sequitur, they can form a cozy relationship with the government first and legally limit competition to their benefit. The American people are suckers for “reform.”
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.
