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> Americans waste almost 40% of all the food that is produced in America, and for all sorts of reasons.

Put another way, free markets produce 67% more than required. When it comes to food, most populations that eat prefer a market that favors the buyer.

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But that is inefficient resource allocation.

We could reduce the waste food production and reduce 'carbon' output from USA.

Presumably next someone will point at another country and say 'they're worse'. That may be true, but it doesn't make the free market efficient, not make externalised environment damage go away.

That is efficient resource allocation, optimizing for scarce and important resources (in the case of USA, labor and customer convenience/time) at the expense of abundant and thus unimportant resources (in the case of USA, food).

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