I was listening to the great Howie Carr the other day and this was a topic for a segment or two. For those who hate watching news videos on-line, the very short version is retailers are shrinking their products while keeping the price the same. This, allegedly, inadvertently games the inflation numbers. A candy bar may remain $1.25, but it is 80% of its original size. The bag of sugar at the market went from five pounds to two kilos, which is roughly 4.5 pounds.

That last trick is common with beverages. A fifth of liquor is now sold as 500ML. A fifth is roughly 25 ounces, while 500ML is 17 ounces. They will mess with the shape of the bottle so it tricks the eye. This may sound like a small thing, but consider this. The tax on alcohol is roughly $23 per gallon. That means the booze maker saves $1.30 on taxes, plus the cost of tax collection and the cost of manufacturing his product. (Cheap liquor is not distilled. It is mixed at plants using water, flavorings and commercial alcohol.) Multiply that over a million bottles and you have real money.

I’ve noticed this all over the grocery market. I’m not insane so I have a sensible diet composing mostly meat, fish, eggs and dairy products. This has been true for most of my life so I tend to buy the same supplies every week. I’m an eat to live, not live to eat person. That means I can have the same thing for breakfast everyday for a year if it is convenient. It also means I notice when my grocery bill changes or when my food shrinks. Since the crash, my food bill has gone up close to 30%. I could get out for about $70 a week and now it is rarely under $100. Like the price of gasoline, food is much more expensive now than a decade ago, even though we are told there has been no inflation.

That’s the fundamental dishonesty at work. We live in a time when lying about everything is so common, no one notices. Ours is a dishonestly culture. The dick heads who came up with the idea to shrink the food are not the first to think of it. Long ago in a country far far away I was told about the pickle maker who hired a new plant manager. Soon, the plant was much more profitable so the owner went to see how it was done. The manager told him how he increased profits by removing one pickle from each jar. That means every ten jars netted him one free jar of pickles he could sell!

The owner fired his manager. The reason was the manager was not just cheating the customers, he was cheating the owner. The “savings” were eventually going to cost the owner business. In other words, they were not savings, they were accrued costs. Somewhere down the line that accrual would reverse out and someone would have to pay, most likely the owner. This is the most basic form of intergenerational theft. That’s spending tomorrow’s profits today. It creates a liability that has to be paid tomorrow.

The fact that the food makers are lying to us is not a stunning development. The standard has been set by public officials who lie so much it is impossible to know the truth. They lie on spec, as the gangsters say. Politicians have always lied, but it became the centerpiece of their morality in the Clinton years. This is when steaming piles of human filth like James Carville took over public discourse. They gave us the word “spin room” which is a cute phrase for the place where they orchestrate a campaign of lies to deceive the public. If you have been living in America for the past 25 years, you have become so use to the casual dishonestly from the ruling class, it now seems immoral to be honest.

That last bit is not always obvious either. In a world where there is no truth, you can easily miss what’s happening. In the last election, Herman Cain was driven from the field because he liked getting freaky with co-workers. The people shrieking in outrage, however, spent the 1990′s defending a man who was a serial rapist and was impeached for shoving cigars into fat interns. The same people who lionized Hillary Clinton for sticking by her man, mocked Cain’s old lady or doing the same. If you need proof we live in an insane asylum, it is right there. (Cain’s defects as a candidate is not the point here)

All of this is predictable. When one religion so throughly dominates, it is impossible to tell the secular institutions from the religious ones, society descends into madness. The Founders understood this and worked to shape public institutions that were weak. They also worked to make it tough for one religion to dominate the rest. The theory being that if no one could hope to have control of the public institutions, they would work to prevent others from it and the result would be a preservation of republican government. They never anticipated what was going to come from the French Revolution.

It is comforting to think that there is a limit to this. You can only shrink the food so far. You can only hide the money creating and debt spiral for so long. Mathematics says there are limits and once those limits are reached, the game is up. I’m not so optimistic. It may be comforting to think there are still enough citizens willing to fight to keep the country, but that’s probably a fantasy. The overwhelming majority want the custodial state and will fight anyone who tries to stop them. No matter how much and how often the Cult lies to them, they will trust the Cult before they trust themselves.