[mcpackieh]

Efficient systems are fragile, redundancy and stockpiling are both inefficient but without them you have fragility. Fragility in the food supply means starvation. Anybody who suggests that the food industry should be entrusted to the ruthless efficiency optimizing mechanism that is free market capitalism should be beaten with sticks until they fall quiet.

[Turing_Machine]

> Anybody who suggests that the food industry should be entrusted to the ruthless efficiency optimizing mechanism that is free market capitalism should be beaten with sticks until they fall quiet.

That's actually been done before, more than once.

The result was 30 million starving to death in the USSR and 60 million starving to death in China. Plus the odd few million in North Korea, Ethiopia, Cambodia, etc.

I'd rather we not run that experiment again, thank you.

[mcpackieh]

The trick is to have neither unregulated free market capitalism nor communism, but instead a liberal democracy in which the government regulates and subsidizes the industry. You know, like the system western nations already have. Wild outlandish concept, I know. Not jumping to one political extreme or the other is a mind-blowing proposition for you I'm sure. There is a whole world of common sense sitting in between Ayn Rand and Stalin.

[Turing_Machine]

> Not jumping to one political extreme or the other is a mind-blowing proposition for you I'm sure.

I'm not the one advocating beating people with sticks.

[mcpackieh]

When people propose ideological "fixes" to a system which is already wildly successful at producing a massive surplus of food, the correct response is to beat them with sticks until they drop their ideological rambling and start thinking in terms of practical survival.

[Turing_Machine]

Beating people with sticks just because they disagree with you is never the "correct response" to anything.