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Comment by icey | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, I don't see the amount of HFCS that's used in the American food system changing much; at least until the government can find a way to continue to prop up the corn farmers.

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What you should argue for is that the government stop subsidizing farmers (and everyone else) altogether. That way, you don't have to worry about unintended consequences inherent in any subsidy program. (Nothing bad happens when you don't rob Peter or Paul.)

The important thing is not the political reality of the moment, but the philosophy people go by in the future.

I seem to recall the very Internets on which you are now ranting arising out of a government-subsidized research program.

Irony.

Sure. But do you really think that the only possible technologies that could give you the features of the current internet are TCP, IP and Unix?

There are lots of ways to do networking, and government subsidy didn't pay for all of them. (Even if HTTP didn't exist, gopher would have filled in just fine!) Nor did it pay for the commercialization of the web browser, which is what made it truly practical for people to use the web. (Remember that before Netscape, browsers from academia didn't support JPEG, and javascript hadn't been invented yet.)

The failure of private firms to account for network externalities is one of the classic examples of coordination failure. So yes, the fact that the US government stepped in and built ARPAnet probably accelerated the emergence of what you and I call the internet by a decade or more.

I agree that private innovation almost always outpaces public innovation. But it took massive government to get the ball rolling in the first place. You need to keep this in mind next time you make silly overgeneralizations like "all subsidies are bad."

You need to substantiate your claim that ARPAnet accelerated the internet by a decade.

Why didn't we see ARPAnet get huge in the early 1980s? The real bottleneck to internet adoption was the lack of computing power (memory and CPU), which were necessary for the rise of graphical interfaces, which were necessary for lots of people to be able to use computers. These things were developed rapidly, and privately. The limits that were pushed to do this were not government edicts, but physical constraints (heat dissipation, die shrinks.) Remember that Xerox PARC was a private research lab!

The "lead" you're talking about sat idle for twenty years until cheap computers got good enough to help normal people. Therefore that "lead" was essentially wasted according to any sensible economic theory.

(I think that ARPAnet was technically great, and TCP/IP, sockets, Unix, etc., are all fine technologies. All I'm saying is that we're at no loss economically if technological development is paid for in a moral way, rather than the way we do it now.)

subsidies != research funding

That was a military program - hardly the same as propping up an industry. Even libertarians accept the need for a military.

I realize you're talking about a collective problem, but at least we can individually choose to avoid this nasty stuff by checking labels and refusing to eat / drink foods that contain it. Save ourselves first, then we can help others.

I agree with you, and that's what I do now. However, it's quite difficult to cut out all products that contain HCFS since it's so widely used.

Cutting out soda was the easiest, but you'll find corn syrup in everything from bread to lunch meats.

A related problem is the tariff on sugar, which artificially keeps the price of sugar high. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Sugar_Program

So you have a subsidy on corn, a tariff on sugar, and the double imbalance causes companies to use HFCS.

If we got rid of the tariff on sugar we could import sugar from brazil, and make ethanol out of it. (Which actually works, unlike ethanol from corn.)

It's politically impractical to just leave the corn farmers out to dry, so instead we choose some other food and give them subsidies on that if they agree to switch from corn.

I'm surprised we can't grow sugar beets there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_beet

You're right, we could. The range goes all the way up to canada.

I know brazil's biofuel process is based off cane. Wonder if beets would work too.

Maybe biofuel would be a good use of corn instead of HFCS. And the gov't could still subsidize that.

Edit: That probably should have included an irony tag...

If the demand for corn drops because of a ban on HFCs, most of the corn farmers would just find some other crop to plant or planet more varieties that are used for other things.

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