| > It is impossible to separate the food industry from government interference, they are permanently symbiotically joined. I'm sorry, but I don't buy this assertion of yours, and since we disagree on something so fundamental we're unlikely to be able to have a useful discussion. > which is exactly what has happened in every unregulated industry in the history of the world. This is an extremely strong claim which requires extremely strong evidence. Do you have any? > the entire crux of health care is not only that it is essential to living and therefore has an infinite price By this logic any action which carries any risk of reducing your life span and is not absolutely necessary should not be done. Do you live your life that way? Does anyone? > unfettered free market capitalism is the system where a rich man's dog eats 5 course gourmet meals while his poor neighbor's child dies of hunger This certainly happens in systems that are regulated by governments--such as ours. Where is your evidence that it happens, and is worse, in systems that are not regulated by governments? > if food is available but inaccessible to the poor In a free market, what would prevent the poor from producing their own food? In the US, historically, this is how most people got their food--they grew it or hunted it or fished for it themselves. Or they lived in small communities where everyone knew each other personally, so they knew the people producing their food. Our current system, in which almost all of us are dependent on a small number of food producers whom we don't know and cannot influence on our own, is, as you appear to agree, a product of massive government regulation--combined, as you conveniently forgot to state, with massive regulatory capture on the part of the corporations that own most of the food production capacity. Yes, the government inspects food to see that it doesn't contain harmful microbes--but people knew how to do that before the government got into the act (if not, humans would have gone extinct long ago from food poisoning). The government also subsidizes the production of high fructose corn syrup and factory farmed meat and poultry. It subsidizes wheat and corn so that most of the US's acreage goes to those crops instead of a greater and healthier variety. (And then it subsidizes ethanol from corn so that we can burn food in our cars while poor people starve.) I could go on and on. Why does the government do all these things? Because it has the power to do it, and that power can be bought, and has been. Of course this system, now that it exists and we are all caught in it, is by no means simple to escape from. But that does not mean it was inevitable, nor that it is good. |