It's very hard to respond to a piece like this - there are some fallacies in the article, but it's such a feel good piece that responding with logic and historical examples is generally unpalatable to people. After reading such a nice story with no downsides, who wants to hear that maybe the author missed some very important points?

Literally every point in the article is not just positive, but overwhelmingly positive. It shows that there are no downsides, no secondary effects, and no one is losing. The author paints beautiful pictures of happy people, like how the program even helps a young military policeman get married and buy a house -

> “It’s silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food,” an athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. “I’ve been eating here every day for two years. It’s a good way to save money to buy a house so I can get married,” he said with a smile.

I'm really tempted to just pick and choose my battles and leave this article alone. If I was going to respond, I'd post some history of how measures like this start off viable because they only move the equilibrium a tiny bit, but slowly the bureaucracy and entropy sets in and you've got stuff like the corn-in-frigging-everything effect in the USA. Or certain kinds of food don't get grown, because a rival staple is at half price due to subsidies - but then if a pestilence hits, you've got no backup crop. Or I'd point out that every attempt to nationalize farms in history - literally every single one without except that I know of - has decreased food yields and led to famines (Soviets, Nazis, various empires in states of emergencies all tried to take over farming - it always leads to lower production, because politicians don't actually know much about farming)... and the tendency after some successes with a program like this is to expand it, with many potential dangers.

If I were going to take on this article, despite all the overwhelming positive emotions, I'd point out a statement like this is pure Orwell:

> The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean more public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.)

A right to food doesn't mean public handouts? Let me get this straight - the city government gives money and free rent to farmers and businesses and people to fund the program, but that's not necessarily a public handout? WTF?

> It can mean redefining the “free” in “free market” as the freedom of all to participate.

Can we redefine the "social" in "socialism" to mean you only exchange with your friends who you know when you choose to? Can we redefine the "commune" in "communism" to mean that it's all about letting people in communities make their own decisions?

If I was going to say anything about this article, I'd try to highlight the propaganda and inherent dishonesty - every point is positive. It doesn't acknowledge any downsides. It uses blatant doublespeak - "public handouts don't necessarily have to be public handouts" - it tries to redefine words to leave the opposition without any way to explain they dislike the position.

If I was going to take on this article, I'd point all this out and ask the users here - even ones who believe in progressivism - to please tune out and criticize articles like this, because it's not much better than Fox News. It's dishonest. It's propaganda and designed to mislead people.

But - I'd be crazy to take on this article which is filled with all these positive emotions, so I will refrain from doing so and not make any of those arguments.