[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.