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Comment by devoply | Hacker News Reader

The "free" market with companies under heavy competition looking to make consumers into fatty addicts obvious fails in many ways. The choice which is available is often extremely unhealthy and dominated by a few conglomerates. So though the argument for the free market works for many things, I think there is ample proof that it does not produce good outcomes for food.

It's optimized to produce cheap, addictive food because that's what the people crave. Much like Brawndo.

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It's dubious to blame obesity on the free market. At the end of the day eating well and staying healthy is a personal responsibility. In most cities and towns there are just as many healthy options available as there are unhealthy options, and most of the time it's no more expensive (or even cheaper) to eat well than it is to buy junk. Fact of the matter is, a lot of people choose to eat poorly.

I strongly disagree with the concept that another person knows better than I do which food I should eat or how I should otherwise live my life.

That said, there should be more education around nutrition. Even free healthy food doesn't help anything if people are too dumb to choose it over junk.

> At the end of the day eating well and staying healthy is a personal responsibility.

A significant portion of human beings are wired for addiction. It's a fiction to claim that people are all free and are responsible for every choice that they make. We for instance control market on all drugs that have any potential for addiction, food has a potential for addiction for lots of people. If people are so free to choose to stay healthy and eat well, then why are all drugs not freely available to anyone who wants them. Opiates, benzos, etc.

No one is saying that anyone else should tell you what to eat. I am simply saying that free food that is healthy should be freely available. No friction and no excuses to not eat healthy. And economically there is a huge incentive to eat that free food as it's free.

Drugs are kind of a straw man, but FWIW, I think those should be legal too. I'd rather my tax money not be spent baby sitting people.

But they are a great example of just how useless it is trying to control people. Heroin is illegal, yet overdoses are at an all time high. A lot of people only end up on heroin because it's so difficult to get less powerful opiate pain killers. Prohibition doesn't work. People are going to do what they want to do anyway.

Some portion of the population are going to make really stupid decisions no matter what. The rest of us need to get over it and stop trying to "help" them if they don't want it.

I feel like personal responsibility is one of those things that work nice on paper, but that requires forethought, correct information, good education, processing power. Then there's things like genetics, bad upbringing, peer pressure, propaganda (adverts), etc... which all subvert those. Human beings are not rational actors who can be expected to make optimal choices even most of the time. Even if we were robots in the sense of a computer program we would still have to deal with limits to complexity, information and processing time. Exerting restraint and self control is known to take time and energy, energy which is in limited supply and requires replenishing through intake of calories.

That's life, though. People have different information, different education, different intelligence, different upbringings, and they make different choices than you or me. I make the best decisions for myself given my experience and situation, and you do the same for yourself, and everybody else does the same for themselves. I'm not going to force my choices on you, and it's not your place to force decisions on me.

Nobody makes the absolute best decisions every single time, but in general they certainly make better decisions for themselves than a stranger.

It does not produce good outcomes for food you believe others should eat. But it produces enough of a variety and abundance of foods to serve a variety of needs from celiac to halal to vegan to allergies.

How do you propose to do better by having the government mandate specific foods?

The variations you are talking about are not really variations, they are mostly marketing variations mixing the same stuff to produce things that appear different in the minds of consumers, but are really variations of the same thing. Our choice of food is severely limited, i.e. everything is made from corn. The variation of crops planted to feed our limited choice is again a mono-culture and optimized for profit, not for the environment or food diversity or animal rights. We have bad diets in general, any dietitian will tell you that.

I don't propose the government mandate anything. I propose the government give out good, healthy food for free. The market can continue to compete for people who wish to participate in it. Food is already subsidized heavily. So what if we give a certain amount of it for free to anyone who wants it.

That would raise the cost of healthy food if it is done wastefully. If the government purchases produce, that bids the price upward. If the produce is unconsumed and then rots, then there is no countervailing downward pressure on price. This would lead to lower dietary consumption of produce.

So the burden is on you to propose a system that would be less-wasteful than our current method of destributing produce. Government-run systems can be more efficient (see: NHS), but the details matter.

EDIT: by details, I mean the specifics of "give people food". If putting it on their doorstep every morning, is it already cooked? Who chooses what is in the packages? How do you know how many people live somewhere? Can I use the unretreived packages to find empty houses to rob?

Here it is. An extremely lean supply chain from farmer or producer to consumer facilitated by automation, probably drones or whatever. A website to order whatever you want and have it delivered to you in a day or two. Works on-demand with a JIT supply chain. Works with the market as the farmer or producer that agrees to such a program still supplies the normal market, and the government pays for the free food according to a certain allowance per citizen. System chooses supplier based on price offered or whatever criteria, for instance shipping cost, to optimize for cost.

Government giving out food = introducing inefficiency, throwing away valuable information flows. This may be reasonable in some cases (food banks/stamps for the poor), but in others, you will inevitably end up with unfortunate effects like people taking free 'healthy' food and feeding it to the pigs to support their 'unhealthy' cravings.

The market isn't free; there are government farm subsidies in all the wrong places. It's no coincidence that cheap junk food is built on a subsidized corn industry.

Even if there were no subsidies, the market would still optimize for what people crave. Cheap addictive food.

Humans are still hardwired for the state of nature where high caloric foods are a scarcity, evolution has not caught up yet. It is very silly and unrealistic to suggest that raising the profit motive above others will bring out the best results in every sphere of human endeavours.

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