The natural right to food unconditionally in society is based,
I submit, on the assumption that it is because a person without food is in
society that he or she is without food. Were the person in an agrarian economy in which people live off the land, having enough food to eat would not be such a formidable problem. Rousseau makes
this point in his Discourse on Inequality.[1] Hence, Mandeville's finding of an equal distribution of food among city dwellers because farmers sold their surplus crops to buy frivolous vanities can be viewed as highly optimistic, and, along with that account, so too Adam Smith's claim that competitive markets satisfy the food needs of specialized factory-laborers by means of competitive markets.
1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Harvard Classics, Charles W. Eliot, ed., Vol. 34 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1910).
