4 ms·
Well of course. Any attempt at helping one person hurts another person. If you give someone a free house, you put a builder out of work. If you give someone fre
by Houshalter 11y ago
Well of course. Any attempt at helping one person hurts another person. If you give someone a free house, you put a builder out of work. If you give someone free food, you put a farmer out of work.
But I don't think it's a zero-sum game. I think the total utility generated by free food is worse than the disutility of the farmer losing his business. Now those people have money to spend on other things that they would have spent on food.
Protectionism benefits producers at the expense of consumers.
Of course ideally you wouldn't send food directly, but just money, which they could use to buy food, or whatever they need.
- digi_owl 11y ago> Well of course. Any attempt at helping one person hurts another person. If you give someone a free house, you put a builder out of work. If you give someone free food, you put a farmer out of work. < I'm not sure i follow. Someone would have had to build something or farm something in the first place for it to be given away.
- Houshalter 11y agoIn this case, that someone is a big company from another country. In the case of donating food in general, instead of the money going to some local farmer, it goes to some farmer in Brazil. The economics of this are a bit more complicated than that though. If importing food from Brazil was cheaper, someone should already be doing it without any charitable intentions. And if if it's not, then it makes more sense for the charity to buy the food locally than pay more to import it.
- loco5niner 11y agoBut in the case of the farmer losing his 'farm', you would need to continue supplying free food for the lifetime of the farmer to truly replace him.