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Stan Cox, senior scientist at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has a new book out addressing the very real need to - gasp! - start rationing our resources. Cleverly entitled, Anyway You Slice It, Cox is making an important argument for a New World Order that many Americans are probably not ready to discuss:

In Any Way You Slice It, Stan Cox shows that rationing is not just a quaint practice restricted to World War II memoirs and stories of gas-station lines in the 1970s. Instead, he persuasively argues that rationing is a vital concept for our fragile present, an era of dwindling resources and environmental crises. Any Way You Slice It takes us on a fascinating search for alternative ways of apportioning life’s necessities, from the wartime goal of "fair shares for all" in the 1940s to present-day water rationing in a Mumbai slum, from the bread shops of Cairo to the struggle for fairness in American medicine and carbon rationing on Norfolk Island in the Pacific. All along the way, Cox asks: Can we limit consumption while assuring everyone a fair share?

Just as health care expert Henry Aaron has compared mentioning the possibility of rationing to "shouting an obscenity in church," Stan Cox is sure to battle head-on with the entitled American Way of Life: "I want what I want when I want it! waaaa!!"

But he's out there leading the way, both with his new book and published articles:

Today, with the widening wealth gap, we already ration basic goods, but in a terribly unfair way. Some of us are not even aware that it's happening, while others see their consumption harshly limited by privation. It's true that fairer, more explicit forms of rationing would not fit into today's economy. But they just might be essential in a future, less fragile society.

That's because creating such a society will mean cutting back deeply on our exploitation of fossil fuels and other resources. Prices of many basic necessities would sail out of the reach of most families, forcing the government to impose price controls. Higher demand would outrun the fixed supply. The result -- as experiences of the 1970s, for example, have taught us -- would be shortages, long lines, and social conflict.

Therefore, any firm ceiling on total resource consumption will make fair-shares rationing necessary. Green-growth enthusiasts don't want to accept that. But hard experience, in peacetime as well as wartime, shows that technical innovation can't fill the resource gap, while campaigns for voluntary restraint are unfair and eventually fizzle in the face of the economy's urge to expand. In contrast, clearly defined resource limits backed up by rationing tend to inspire a sense of common purpose.

Yes, that's the operative phrase: -- "common purpose." It's a phrase which is oftentimes at odds with the very American trait of individualism. And because we have the largest economy in the world by far ($15 trillion GDP), there is so much money sloshing around here that we are convinced that rationing is a foreign concept.

But then again, we thought that smoking in public would never be banned, gay marriage would never be legal, and a black president would never sit in the Oval Office.

Let's help to remove rationing from the Third Rail in our national dialogue, shall we? We need more like Stan Cox leading the way!

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