Maggie's Farm

I've been hawking Sowell's Basic Economics for years. It really is an inoculation to and an antidote for virtually all left wing economic policy. The only other person to make economics so easily understandable was Milton Friedman .

As an aside, when I visited the British Museum some years ago, I saw an old Roman set of armor. What amazed me about it was that the person whom it would fit would have been about the size of my then 12 year old son - and he was a stick figure. So the requirements to maintain an army of 90k men would have been significantly less than that required to maintain rations for our army (in the field, between 4 and 6k calories a day for infantry troops, if I recall correctly.)

That said, it still would have been a daunting task indeed for Hannibal as he crossed the Alps, where the opportunity for foraging would have been very limited. As I recall, he lost a significant portion of his army and all but a handful of elephants on that march, and one can't but wonder if a few of the elephants who dropped weren't on the dinner menu.