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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what you mean by not making rational choices?

People have a preference for meat. Rationality doesn't say what your preferences should be, it just helps you satisfy them.

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I mean thinking about long term consequences of their actions and making a choice that leads to the best outcome for the society at large. You're right in saying people have a preference, but the way you say it makes it seem like that's all their is to it, as if people's dietary choices have no broader impact.

People have a preference for meat post huge subsidies, which essentially makes the preference mean nothing whatsoever. If people prefer meat when it's not subsidised, then sure, what the hell, let them have it.

Farming and subsidies go hand in hand. I'm from the midwest. Whether it's growing food in the first place or leaving a field fallow in another, a subsidy is probably involved.

This is a good thing. Farming is very tough business and I would rather keep these guys in business because I like eating quite a bit.

People would still farm without subsidies.

First: they are growing some crops now already that are not subsidised.

Second: a general drop in subsidies will mostly just result in lower land rents. The reward for farm labour will stay roughly the same, because it's mostly set by the general equilibrium in the wider labour market.

Beyond patronage, one of the primary goals of ag subsidies is to prevent farm land from being converted to non-farmland. This effectively increases the ability to comparatively quickly put more crop acres there if for some reason (e.g., weather, war, etc) we need to increase supply. Without subsidies it's likely that the lower land rent would cause more fields to be converted to other purposes and we'd run this a bit leaner (i.e., more in accordance to the market on some shorter time horizon). There's also always an element of keeping more expensive ag in country than relying solely on imports.

I don't know how strong this effect would be, but I've heard these arguments a lot. A good deal of early EU politics were measures to make sure that liberalized trade didn't just result in the French agricultural industry vanishing.

Yes, that argument is common, but it doesn't mean that it holds water.

If you actually wanted to ensure a steady food supply, you'd use subsidies that directly target that.

Eg instead of subsidising actual production of a few specific crops, you'd have subsidies that reward being able to produce eg lots of calories in a field on short notice. (And every year, you'd challenge a random selection of recipients to produce the promised calories on short notice. Of course, if you use that land for already for actual production, that's fine.)

You'd also reward people to stockpile lots of canned food, I guess?

> A good deal of early EU politics were measures to make sure that liberalized trade didn't just result in the French agricultural industry vanishing.

Yes, but that's more of a function of the power of the agricultural lobby, than any rational policy.

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