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Comment by veddox | Hacker News Reader

There‘s no such thing as a free meal. Of course you could distribute free food to all your citizens (the Ancient Romans famously did), but somebody still needs to pay for it.

It‘s not just about on-farm labour, you need big machines (and lots of diesel!), fertiliser, pesticides… And that‘s before you look at all the rest of the food system, because to put a meal on the table you need the whole supply chain (ag-tech, fertiliser production, food processing, wholesale suppliers, etc.)

In modern agriculture, the farmer only gets a fraction of the money you pay for your loaf of bread, because there are so many other people involved.

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Machines and free energy (solar, for example) make free meals possible.

Maybe if we can reduce the need for profit we also reduce the need for fertilizers, maybe the relation between fertilizers used and crop productivity is not linear (-20% productivity but -40% fertilizers?). Food processing won't be necessary: why have a factory for chips? or for hummus? _Most_ people can cook.

The thing is, contrary to other things, like fusion, this is possible. Now more so than ever; we have everything we need to start a food UBI.

The rest are just accounting details, like how less rich the 1% should be to fund all this.

> contrary to other things, like fusion, this is possible.

Of course it's possible, I'm just saying it's not (and can never be) free. "Free for consumers" simply means somebody else paid for the costs - or more likely, the consumer paid the costs through taxes rather than at the store. You will always have input costs to produce an output, and these will not be negligible.

Just a few points on what you said, and these are not "accounting details": (1) Solar energy is not free - you need to build, install, and maintain panels and a power grid. (2) Of course you can reduce fertiliser, organic farming does so and takes ~20% yield decrease (depending on the crop). But then you have higher labour and machine costs to control weeds, and an overall higher per-hectare price. (3) Food processing matters because you probably don't want to spend most of your day milling your grain ration to make flour that you can then bake into bread. Ditto for other types of staple foods (you want to make your own sausages?). (On a historical side-note, here's a write-up of how ancient food systems worked: https://acoup.blog/2020/08/06/collections-bread-how-did-they...).

Bottom line: Food systems are incredibly complex!

There is no particular "need" for profit, but by default most people will direct their labor and capital towards whatever earns them they highest profit. Attempts to impose central planning on food production inevitably lead to shortages, rationing, black markets, and famine.

It seems to me that most modern agriculture is, at least in effect, centrally planned, between regulation and subsidy. I am curious whether you have a counterexample outside of subsistence farming.

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