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A “superpower” who can’t seem make enough masks to protect its own medical professionals from a pandemic. It’s an interesting situation.

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Rome was a "superpower" militarily but it couldn't feed itself, and had to rely on grain from Egypt and the fertile crescent to feed its population.....

Here we can't produce some basic silly things... as it is not that economical during normal times... Perhaps farming subsides are not a crazy type of idea after all.

Well two things come to mind here:

- People can learn from Rome's mistakes.

- Rome did at least some farming.

- Rome is no more.

I’m reminded of an old saying that there two hard things in Computer Science:

- cache invalidation

- naming things

- and off-by-one errors

My favorite computer science joke by far!

Maybe it was an array of answers, lol

In the spirit of good humor, I will not edit my comment :)

Farming subsidies for food. Not a bad idea. Subsidizing overproduction of ethanol is another issue.

On france you have their biggest billionaire owner of some big brand names reconverting all it's factories to produce that stuff

Farming subsidies for food systematically cause overproduction. This is problematic environmentally for land use and climate. It also accelerates soil depletion and salinification.

Am I taking crazy pills? The US and Europe subsidize their agricultural industries heavily and have done so for decades. They're fully or largely capable of feeding themselves - and yes, precisely because these places decided that food is a significant factor for the stability of a country and a national security issue. Hell, people bitch and moan about how agriculture gets so many subisidies (corn in the US? anything in the EU), but frankly, to outsource food production to the rest of the world would seriously threaten the cohesiveness of our countries.

I dont think the comment you're replying to was saying the US isnincaphle of feeding itself, but trying to make a comparison to past empires which had outsourced parts of their economies to foreign powers

At the time Rome was a military superpower and it did not have the capacity to feed itself, the agriculture was at a completely different level. Farming subsidies have no logical link to Rome 2000 years ago.

"Superpower" in the American context is largely about our ability to project our military and economic power upon other societies, not about our ability to provide for the well-being of all Americans.

You could even (cynically) look at it the other way, that part of our "superpower" is the projection upon the world of the disaffection and anger that we breed internally by not providing for the well-being of all our citizens (in ways far more severe than a dearth of N95 masks). You see that phenomenon much more clearly in dictatorships and autocracies, but to an extent it's here too.

When the hard constraint is not losing profit, many things are difficult to do.

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