3 ms·
You couldn't have picked a worse example. Food market in the US is incredibly distorted by corn subsidies. There are also strategic stockpiles and regulations a
by pornel 4y ago
You couldn't have picked a worse example. Food market in the US is incredibly distorted by corn subsidies. There are also strategic stockpiles and regulations around commodity prices to stop periodic free market booms and busts from causing famines. Free market speculators have once fucked up so hard that there's Onion Futures Act.
Modern food surplus is mainly thanks to the Green Revolution, thanks to advancements in fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery. A lot of that was government-lead.
On top of the heavily-controlled agriculture there is mostly a free market for consumer products (just needs to be regulated not to save costs by causing cancers), but that has innovated into making junk food cheaper than a healthy diet.
- WalterBright 4y agoThere are indeed government distortions in the market, you mentioned corn subsidies. There are also government payments to farmers to not grow food. These are not failures of the free market. The growth of junk food can be attributed in large part to corn subsidies. Now, if you attribute the success of agriculture to the government, why have all the collective farming systems failed completely? Why did the USSR have to import wheat from Kansas? Modern wheat came from Norman Borlaug's research, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation - not a government project. He received a well-earned Nobel Peace Prize for it. The Haber-Bosch process was developed at BASF, a private company, and was the first industrialized production of fertilizer. > heavily-controlled agriculture That's simply not true. A subsidy is not "control". The government does not direct what gets produced, who produces it, how it is produced, nor does it take the profits.