[parennoob]

> Complaining about this is essentially the same as complaining about soup-kitchen volunteers. Surely there are plenty of people that would love to be paid for that job, but we have all these smug elitist volunteers doing the jobs for free.

This comparison is inaccurate – soup kitchen volunteers are not performing a complete job which is being bid for. This underbid is more analogous to if a local government center asking for bids to serve a meeting of 500 people, and a local soup kitchen bidding $1 for the contract because they are essentially giving away free food. They then end up supplying the meeting with 500 bowls of great chili, and everyone is happy.

If the soup kitchen started doing this every time the government center issued a bid, the local restaurants would never make any money from the government center. This is not to say that they would never make money. But it is legitimate for an average restaurant in the area to be worried by the soup kitchen's actions, and view it as a potential devaluer of their product.

[kbenson]

Sure, but the government is under no obligation to support restaurants through soup kitchen contracts. Their mandate is to feed the poor. They should choose the option that lets them achieve this goal as efficiently as possible. Social, technological and economic changes that make it harder for restaurants to compete can and will happen, and it's the job of the restaurants to respond in a competitive way if they want those contracts, or shift their focus to a more lucrative sector, or go out of business. That's not smug and elitist (as the top level comment implied), that's the system we have and it's responsible for lifting more people out of poverty than anything we've tried before.

You can safely ignore the rest of my comment if you like, it's sort of me just rambling because there's a place to do it.

An important concept that I think some people miss with free markets and "fairness" is that it's all relative to the time frame you are looking at. Yes, it's possibly more fair (depending on how you determine fairness) to right now to completely redistribute all wealth equally between all world inhabitants, but will that result in overall better outcomes for people 50 years from now? If we had done that 50 years ago, would we be better off right now? 100 years ago? To my view, free markets are the best way we've found so far to increase wealth overall over time, so it helps prevent local maxima effects and eventually leads to better outcomes. Unfortunately that means some people get the short end of the stick, but it's important to remember that the short end is short relative to the other end, and the stick is getting longer overall as time goes on. That's not to say I believe in a completely hand-off approach to markets. They can and are manipulated at times, and there are runaway effects that should be mitigated.