I see this article as a 3-page argument for stiffer controls over the food industry. We can't leave our nutrition in the hands of a free market, or we'll all be living on Oreos.
No, the argument is that it's not actually a free market. If it was a free market, there would be an incentive not to overproduce, because it would just drive down the price and they wouldn't be able to recoup the additional costs. It's the outside influence of the government on the market that enables the overproduction.
I'm talking about nutrition, though, and there's a free market in the consumer products— "corn product with value added"— that are making people fat. As before, when there was a ton of corn whisky on the market and people drank five gallons of it a year. Soft drinks are so widely available because they're cheap and pumped out into the marketplace by companies that are entirely profit-driven. They don't care what the effects are from a public health standpoint, as the government would be. The government should be, not just because it's "of the people and for the people," but because the effects of cheap Coke are most deeply felt by the poor. Coca-Cola doesn't have to pay for Medicaid.
Actually (as the article argues), overproduction was a recurrent problem back when agriculture was a free market too. Farmers would overproduce, prices would fall, and each farmer would work as hard as he could to increase his output and regain his income, thus keeping the cycle going. Most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was like that -- almost a lifetime of increasing production and falling prices, and misery, on American farms. (I'm an American historian -- trust me on this one.) Given how much agricultural land the United States had cleared by 1870, a free market doesn't work so well. There's always more land to bring into production, more intensive technologies to apply.
The real point of the article is that government interventions are not all alike. The system set up in the 1930s had its problems, but it stabilized food prices for both farmers and consumers. The system set up in the 1970s subsidizes calorie production and thus drives down food prices. If we call them both just "government programs," we obscure the differences that make a difference.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2005-02-25 12:21 pm (UTC)I see this article as a 3-page argument for stiffer controls over the food industry. We can't leave our nutrition in the hands of a free market, or we'll all be living on Oreos.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-25 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-25 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-25 04:35 pm (UTC)The real point of the article is that government interventions are not all alike. The system set up in the 1930s had its problems, but it stabilized food prices for both farmers and consumers. The system set up in the 1970s subsidizes calorie production and thus drives down food prices. If we call them both just "government programs," we obscure the differences that make a difference.