[crapshoot101]

Victor David Hanson is a pretty conservative guy and his point certainly has some merit, but there's definitely some "rose-tinted" glasses here. For example, while I tend to agree with him on the water and environmental assessment studies, the biggest issue in CA is that those farmers' don't pay anywhere near market-pricing for the water, which in turns provides a significant incentive to grow water-hungry crops. That's not the necessarily the best example to illustrate the divide he highlights.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/the...

[x0x0]

The author is a liar.

To pretend the water crisis is about food is a giant lie, if the given subtext is we need to eat. The author is smart enough not to outright lie, but he definitely leaves a wildly incorrect impression.

We piss away acre-feet of water per orchard to irrigate almonds, using approximately one gallon of water per almond. I love almonds, but we will live just fine without them. No-one will starve if they don't have almonds.

We export a hundred billion gallons of water per year via alfalfa. ie a year's water supply for a million families. I'm sure Japan will whine if they have to figure out some other way to feed their cattle, but that's their problem. Nobody in California or the US will go without food if Japan and China have more expensive beef, or are forced to internalize the the environmental impact of their food choices.

We grow fucking cotton in the desert. You don't eat cotton.

etc...

I've posted about this before, but pretending that the water crisis in CA is a choice between food, where the subtext is people will go hungry, and environmental concerns is a flat out lie. It's a choice between 2% of the economy that is wildly, ludicrously wasteful with an increasing precious resource and is pitching a tantrum that they may not be able to treat water as effectively free.

[SilasX]

And yet I'm still forced to use a heavily throttled shower head on pain of major fines, as if it makes any difference.

[sgustard]

Here you go, $256 billion in farm subsidies since 1995. Do farmers pay market rates for anything?

http://farm.ewg.org

[txru]

America has never had a famine, though.

Indeed, aside from avocados recently and a few times when there were bacteria scares, I can't think of any time where any American agricultural product couldn't be found in stores.

I definitely believe that the farm subsidies are poorly targeted, but those things above aren't to be snorted at.

[yasth]

I assure you that you could keep America famine free for far less. Indeed pretty much the entire support structure is only 80 years old at the oldest, so america managed just fine for a far longer period of time without supports and without a famine than with them.

Also there are some products (like rice) just shouldn't have 100% availability of US grown products. It isn't like the US will starve without US grown rice, and the US long supported far more rice than was profitable. Importantly the US dropped lots of subsidies on rice, and production wasn't all that impacted (3% declines).

So yeah, you might also say that US support of auto makers is good because never have you been completely unable to find a new US made car to buy, but that doesn't make it necessary and certainly doesn't make it good policy.

[hackuser]

> America has never had a famine, though.

I'm not sure I agree:

* We've had massive production problems, such as in the Dust Bowl.

* Many Americans are malnourished; the US is not getting enough food to them by whatever mechanism (supermarkets, food stamps, etc.).

Also, is it true that there were no famines in the 150 years before the Great Depression, even localized ones (i.e., not nationwide)?

[zorpner]

America has -- just not in living memory. The single greatest contributor to the absurd American prosperity of the first half of the 20th century is the mysterious extinction of the Rocky Mountain locust, leaving North America the only major landmass with agricultural potential and no native locust species.