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Comment by setecgastronomy | Hacker News Reader

That's blatantly false. The US, Europe, China, Japan and every top agricultural nation subsidizes agriculture.

Subsidized agriculture has been responsible for pretty much ending hunger in most of the world. Free market agriculture hasn't been responsible for ending any hunger.

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In the USA, welfare spending dwarfs farm subsidies by a factor of >50. No doubt this is true elsewhere, too. Private ownership of agriculture is what ended hunger. Its effect has been shown quite convincingly in Massachusetts and China.

> In the USA, welfare spending dwarfs farm subsidies by a factor of >50.

That depends on what you count as a "subsidy". Are all the roads, dams, diverting of rivers, etc counted as "subsidies"?

> Its effect has been shown quite convincingly in Massachusetts and China.

Modern subsidized agriculture in both countries has quite convincingly showed it.

Not sure why you are now moving the goalpost to welfare.

The US didn't always have agricultural subsidies. Hunger in the US was virtually eliminated before the Civil War. Agricultural subsidies did not happen until after WW1.

You could argue that government help in wiping out the natives and stealing their land and giving it to the white settlers is an agricultural subsidy. It's true that we've never had persistent hunger in the US. But that's cause we stole all the natives land. The natives however suffered tremendous hunger/starvation though.

> But that's cause we stole all the natives land.

Archaeological bone evidence of the pre-Columbian Indians is that they periodically had famines. Having land is not a sufficient condition for having a consistent, sufficient food supply.

The US, around 1800, was the first country in history to achieve a consistent food surplus.

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