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I won't speak for Europeans, I lived there for a few years but not long enough to understand their system deeply enough. I agree though, removing subsidies wou

I won't speak for Europeans, I lived there for a few years but not long enough to understand their system deeply enough. I agree though, removing subsidies would destroy many of the farms that exist today. It's a prime example of the risks of welfare programs, they are presumably all run with very good intentions but in this case the industry is so wholly dependent on the subsidies that we can't remove them. The problem there is a broken system can only be propped up so many times, and the more you pile on top of it the worse it is when it finally collapses. Hopefully people wiser than me can orchestrate a soft landing here, because I can't personally see how we safely transition our food industry off the centralized, subsidized model.

throwaway894345 3y ago
> It's a prime example of the risks of welfare programs, they are presumably all run with very good intentions but in this case the industry is so wholly dependent on the subsidies that we can't remove them I don't think this can reasonably be interpreted as a cautionary tale about subsidizing food prices because even if we never subsidized food production, the alternative was starvation among the poor, which seems strictly worse. Yeah, we have a system that is dependent on subsidies, but that's precisely because human beings are necessarily dependent on food. As far as I can tell, the only way to avoid both subsidies and starvation is to drastically reduce inequality. I could also believe that we shouldn't subsidize food production, but rather we should have essentially expanded food stamps--basically give poor (and maybe even middle class) people a food stipend to offset the rising food costs. > Hopefully people wiser than me can orchestrate a soft landing here, because I can't personally see how we safely transition our food industry off the centralized, subsidized model. "Centralized" just means "more efficient" and thus "lower cost". Transitioning away from that model necessarily implies higher costs, which means you need subsidies so people can still afford to eat. Moreover, I don't think you're going to transition as far away from "centralized" as people think, because most of the country doesn't have the climate and geography to support local farming at the scale required to feed people (especially along the coasts). Moreover, you're just not going to grow bananas, citrus fruit, etc at scale in northern states.

throwaway894345 3y ago

> It's a prime example of the risks of welfare programs, they are presumably all run with very good intentions but in this case the industry is so wholly dependent on the subsidies that we can't remove them I don't think this can reasonably be interpreted as a cautionary tale about subsidizing food prices because even if we never subsidized food production, the alternative was starvation among the poor, which seems strictly worse. Yeah, we have a system that is dependent on subsidies, but that's precisely because human beings are necessarily dependent on food. As far as I can tell, the only way to avoid both subsidies and starvation is to drastically reduce inequality. I could also believe that we shouldn't subsidize food production, but rather we should have essentially expanded food stamps--basically give poor (and maybe even middle class) people a food stipend to offset the rising food costs. > Hopefully people wiser than me can orchestrate a soft landing here, because I can't personally see how we safely transition our food industry off the centralized, subsidized model. "Centralized" just means "more efficient" and thus "lower cost". Transitioning away from that model necessarily implies higher costs, which means you need subsidies so people can still afford to eat. Moreover, I don't think you're going to transition as far away from "centralized" as people think, because most of the country doesn't have the climate and geography to support local farming at the scale required to feed people (especially along the coasts). Moreover, you're just not going to grow bananas, citrus fruit, etc at scale in northern states.