Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> when the product is mandatory for life

Would you say food is in that category? The free market is the only system that has ever provided a consistent food surplus. The US, with its free market, became the first country with food security and you can see it in the statistics - the average height of Americans increased throughout the 19th century, peaking out around WW2.

> why we don't put municipal water on the free market

Instead we have water intensive almonds being grown in an arid area undergoing a record drought, alongside the government blocking desalination plants (California)

> why Texas can't keep the lights on

Texas is undergoing a record heat wave. Rolling blackouts are predicted this summer for California.

> no sane country would try to distribute healthcare on a free market

Health care in the US was cheap before the government got involved in it.

View on HN

You couldn't have picked a worse example. Food market in the US is incredibly distorted by corn subsidies. There are also strategic stockpiles and regulations around commodity prices to stop periodic free market booms and busts from causing famines. Free market speculators have once fucked up so hard that there's Onion Futures Act.

Modern food surplus is mainly thanks to the Green Revolution, thanks to advancements in fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery. A lot of that was government-lead.

On top of the heavily-controlled agriculture there is mostly a free market for consumer products (just needs to be regulated not to save costs by causing cancers), but that has innovated into making junk food cheaper than a healthy diet.

There are indeed government distortions in the market, you mentioned corn subsidies. There are also government payments to farmers to not grow food.

These are not failures of the free market. The growth of junk food can be attributed in large part to corn subsidies.

Now, if you attribute the success of agriculture to the government, why have all the collective farming systems failed completely? Why did the USSR have to import wheat from Kansas?

Modern wheat came from Norman Borlaug's research, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation - not a government project. He received a well-earned Nobel Peace Prize for it.

The Haber-Bosch process was developed at BASF, a private company, and was the first industrialized production of fertilizer.

> heavily-controlled agriculture

That's simply not true. A subsidy is not "control". The government does not direct what gets produced, who produces it, how it is produced, nor does it take the profits.

> Health care in the US was cheap before the government got involved in it.

Only for those who were healthy and had employer provided insurance. Everyone else either went without or paid through the nose or was dropped as soon as they actually needed services. Healthcare premiums are more expensive now because the insurance is a much better product for many people.

You don't know the history of health care in the United States. Before the government got involved by instituting wage limits during WWII, there was no such thing as "employer provided insurance".

Health care in the US was cheap only if you never got sick. It was a false promise.

Look deeper into that. For example, health care price increases paralleled inflation until 1968, when they started on a steep upward trajectory, which has never eased. 1968 was when Medicare/Medicaid appeared.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com