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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

Since food is a basic human necessity, should farms and grocery stores all have to be nonprofit?

Sounds good to me. I sure am subsidizing farms with my taxes, not sure why I need giant corporate owners back there making millions off of it all.

Yes?

Why not?

You seem to think that those proposing this don't recognize we're pushing for a massive shift in how things work, that will disrupt many areas significantly.

We recognize that just fine. There are ways to mitigate the harm from that disruption.

It's absolutely clear to us that even if we don't mitigate that harm, the system afterward will be much more just and much more kind and humane than the system we have now.

It’s hard for many to consider alternatives under the long shadow of the Cold War where the US food and grocery system was the envy of the world and was basically fantasy land compared to the Soviet counterparts. So why not mitigate current harms instead of overthrow a system with a speculative alternative with speculative mitigations?

Otoh: maybe just saying “everything remains the same except the large orgs are non-profit” could be an interesting mitigation to current system.

Nobody has ever explained how this "mitigation" is supposed to happen. Instead there are just flippant "Yes? Why not?" comments like yours and your siblings, as if "why not" hasn't been demonstrated and explained countless times before.

Feel free to show any example of a non-market-based society that had plentiful food. You cannot. Non-market-based societies always fail to provide what people want. The only societies in history where the problem has been too many calories instead of not enough calories are modern commercial societies.

Of course you can't. Post-scarcity is a new thing; you can't go to societies of the past and see its effects.

But you act as though adding any features to our society and economy that move toward taking better care of all our people would somehow ruin the whole thing.

Now, to answer your initial question:

Provide governmental support for small businesses during the transition—local grocery stores, small family farms; not the ones already making hundreds of millions+ in profit every year. A lot of this support wouldn't even need to be monetary—remember, this isn't even talking about making food free or anything; it's just talking about moving to a non-profit model. The most obvious type of assistance is legal (to understand what being a non-profit means and how to legally go about making those changes) and accounting (to understand what this will mean for their books).

I don't believe that massive chain supermarkets and agribusiness conglomerates should get much in the way of financial support for this kind of change—they've already been making huge amounts of money for their execs and shareholders. And, again, only one of those groups actually has to stop making money off this. While I would 100% support separate measures to reduce the exec pay disparity, that's out of scope for this particular discussion. Going non-profit just means you don't have shareholders who get to make money off the business—and, vitally, you don't have shareholders pushing the business to make more profit at the expense of pricing people out of staples or reducing the quality of the food.

We need farms and some sort of food distribution system for everyone to survive, so that doesn't sound like a bad idea.

You could always decide that grocery stores are allowed to be for-profit, or perhaps only things like co-ops or benefit corporations.

We eventually came to accept the reality that our society works better if we ensure universal access to things like mail, so we should be willing to evaluate whether the list of universal goods needs to be expanded

If food production operated as, say co-operatives between farmers and customers, what do you think would be worse or better than the current model.

(Note: I get my insurance through a co-op, and the difference between my experience and people who don't is pretty eye-opening.)

Literally yes.

Why don't you provide that service profit free then. People on this stuff are always all talk. Id be interested in people demonstrating a world with no profit on a smaller scale first. Why not run a company where every one gets paid the same and demonstrate your competence.

This is a great chance to exercise curiosity rather being dismissive.

Why would anyone want to "exercise curiosity" about abject nonsense? There's nothing to be curious about here. You might as well make the same comment on any topic where something has been dismissed. The concept of "every human need" (whatever a "need" is, given that anatomically modern humans lived without electricity for hundreds of thousands of years just fine) necessarily being provided without any profit motive is just plain stupid. It's being dismissed for that reason.

What is "stupid", or even controversial, about the idea that society should be organized to provide for people's needs? To suggest that society should be a zero sum economic gladiatorial affair, that that's the best our species can do or should strive for, seems like a failure of imagination to me.