"Food is a manifestation of our local fertility goddess"?
Here in the real world, food is produced by work. A lot of work - growing, transporting, preparing, and selling food accounts for about 10% of American employment.
Also, even though farming requires labour today, why should the person who "owns" the land be the one who gets to keep all the value?
That's what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism is supposed to fix
> why should the person who "owns" the land be the one who gets to keep all the value?
They aren't? Many people divide the value in the final product.
The person who owns the land pays other people for farm equipment, fertilizer, weed killers, pest control, harvesting, etc, then they sell the product to other people who add value in various ways and each sells for a higher price.
If that were true, the less compassionite owners would set the pay to zero, so it's obviously more complicated than that.
Regardless, my issue is that the people who do the actual work do not get to determine how profits get distributed - power is held over them by the owner (who is only the owner by virtue of state enforcement of property rights), and this leads to accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a select few. IE, capitalism.
When noone owns the land, this happens:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_...
You know, there's an unfair advantage if you get access to the best land and then that grows you the best crops and then profit and so on. So, everyone gets chances to farm different plots.
I agree with you about the problems with corporate land ownership.
They don't. Farming profits are razer thin. That value goes to the person who owns the land, the people who work the land, the people that ship the product, the manufacturers of equipment, shop owners, the list goes on.
Look, I'm a REAL person. You know how I get apples in apple season? I walk to a park near my house where there are decades-old apple trees. I don't know who planted them. Nobody today does anything to care for them. They just do what trees do. And the majority of the apples fall on the ground because nobody picked them. And I walk over to the park and I pick apples and eat them.
Oh, but I had to WALK there you say. And I had to WORK to have a home in this town. And we have to have a working society in order to pay the City to keep the park from being sold to a developer who would cut down all the trees. Or that I have to do the work of EATING the apple, like chewing it and so on.
I mean, this is just endless.
It's quite simple: Either "no such thing as a free lunch" is falsifiable and I've falsified it with real evidence OR it's unfalsifiable because you'll claim that any tangential aspect of existence that can be called "work" makes the apple not free. Either way, the aphorism is no good.
"Too good to be true" is a better aphorism because it isn't used to imply that everything good always has a catch. It doesn't say "Anything great is too good to be true", it just asserts that things that seem great can be too good to be true (they have some catch). And that's useful because we should think about all the catches and context of things. But that doesn't mean we should become cynics who just deny that anything great is ever possible.
Seeing the rather literal tone of the conversation, I responded with an equally literal interpretation of the comic. Of course I know that the "local fertility goddess" is a figurative expression for the abundance of nature, but "no such thing as a free lunch" is also figurative, and "the pot calling the kettle black" isn't actually about a talking pot.
Yes, there are a few free lunches. That doesn't make it bad expression, just not a literal one.
"The idea that everything in life should have a price", as you said, is hyperbole too. There are lots of things that no one is trying to put a price on, but let's not go down that road.
> Some things in life are abundant and need no pricing and have nothing hidden.
Yes, but food isn't one of them in a world with 7 billion people. Compared to the population, food isn't abundant, and managing to feed so many people is one of the greatest human achievements; it's all thanks to the work of hundreds of millions of people, not nature's abundance.