> What would the world look like if agriculture, like education, healthcare, air, and water be thought of as a public benefit enterprise rather than a private p

> What would the world look like if agriculture, like education, healthcare, air, and water be thought of as a public benefit enterprise rather than a private profit-driven enterprise? Some of us know that, because we lived through exactly that. It would look like evil empire of Soviet Union. The “public benefit enterprise” of Communist farming pushed for collectivization and reduction of small holding, precisely for the same reason as profit-oriented private farming had: to maximize productivity. It still had not been enough to actually feed the people: shortages were constant, famines were common (though most of them were manufactured methods of genocide), and Soviet Union imported massive amounts of grain from United States. At the same time, in Communist state, “public property” meant in practice “nobody’s property”, and so Soviet Union oversaw environmental destruction on a massive scale, limited only by ineptness and inefficiency of the entire communist enterprise. So no, I’m not particularly excited about the prospect of making farming a “public benefit enterprise”, thank you very much. For an activity to actually benefit the public, you need to do more than declare it “public benefit, not for profit”. At the same time, for-profit enterprises have benefitted people immensely, so much so that people don’t even notice that anymore, as it became a constant, basic element of reality.