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Farmers in Europe and Canada are also heavily subsidized.

tialaramex 8y ago
Food security. Anywhere paying attention to history knows that you can get starved into submission, so if you don't have food security any money you spent on walls, navies, missile silos etcetera was pointless. So it makes good public policy sense to subsidize local food production and/or have high tariffs on imported food. In WWII Britain came closest to having to surrender due to food shortages. It didn't have then (and doesn't have now) enough food production to feed everybody, it relies on imports, and during a war that gets tricky. It got down to, I think, one week's rations on hand. If the U-boats had been just a little bit luckier for just another couple of weeks the British government anticipated uncontrollably levels of public disorder and then one way or another surrender.
- mikekchar 8y ago
  Not to dispute your main point, but in Japan more than 1 million people died of starvation after the US blockades in WWII. It's the reason it is illegal to import staple foods into Japan to this day. The question of whether or not Japan would have surrendered without nuclear attacks is still very much an open one. It's really hard to say what the Japanese government was thinking at the time, but I can say that my mother in law told me that the only reason she survived is because her uncle had a garden and had a few sweet potatoes. Most people that were alive during the war suffers still from ill health as a result of malnutrition at the time. It has given me considerable cause to re-evaluate things I thought I knew.
  - tialaramex 8y ago
    I'm not sure, but in re-reading what I posted it occurs to me that it's possible to read it as suggesting nowhere else starved (or not as badly as Britain) whereas what I was intending was that Britain's big threat turned out not to be aerial bombardment, rocket attack, or straight-up beach invasion but simply starvation. Invading Britain proved completely impractical, bombing it into submission was too costly to be continued, but starving it was close to working. Culture varies, and it seems unlikely that the British "stiff upper lip" would have carried on through starvation rations as the Japanese did. Certainly the government of the day is recorded as having expected to be overthrown once the reality of starvation was felt by the common people, unless the next shipments of food arrived (which they did).
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Farming is subsidized pretty much everywhere in the developed world because without it we'd all starve to death.

Food security. Anywhere paying attention to history knows that you can get starved into submission, so if you don't have food security any money you spent on walls, navies, missile silos etcetera was pointless. So it makes good public policy sense to subsidize local food production and/or have high tariffs on imported food. In WWII Britain came closest to having to surrender due to food shortages. It didn't have then (and doesn't have now) enough food production to feed everybody, it relies on imports, and during a war that gets tricky. It got down to, I think, one week's rations on hand. If the U-boats had been just a little bit luckier for just another couple of weeks the British government anticipated uncontrollably levels of public disorder and then one way or another surrender.

mikekchar 8y ago
Not to dispute your main point, but in Japan more than 1 million people died of starvation after the US blockades in WWII. It's the reason it is illegal to import staple foods into Japan to this day. The question of whether or not Japan would have surrendered without nuclear attacks is still very much an open one. It's really hard to say what the Japanese government was thinking at the time, but I can say that my mother in law told me that the only reason she survived is because her uncle had a garden and had a few sweet potatoes. Most people that were alive during the war suffers still from ill health as a result of malnutrition at the time. It has given me considerable cause to re-evaluate things I thought I knew.
- tialaramex 8y ago
  I'm not sure, but in re-reading what I posted it occurs to me that it's possible to read it as suggesting nowhere else starved (or not as badly as Britain) whereas what I was intending was that Britain's big threat turned out not to be aerial bombardment, rocket attack, or straight-up beach invasion but simply starvation. Invading Britain proved completely impractical, bombing it into submission was too costly to be continued, but starving it was close to working. Culture varies, and it seems unlikely that the British "stiff upper lip" would have carried on through starvation rations as the Japanese did. Certainly the government of the day is recorded as having expected to be overthrown once the reality of starvation was felt by the common people, unless the next shipments of food arrived (which they did).

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago

Farming is subsidized pretty much everywhere in the developed world because without it we'd all starve to death.