> Something's fucking wrong with the company and maybe shouldn't be in charge of making food...
There has been a lot wrong since the early 1970s, but the nature of ponzi dynamics are that they show no direct evidence upfront that might allow prevention of the downward failures later.
We are only seeing the consequences of these things now that its reached past a tipping point. That said regulation only fuels and worsens the issues you describe.
The underlying issue is many market sectors have become so concentrated in terms of marketshare that these companies can tacitly cooperate from a distance. When these things happen and destroy the fine balance, chaos reigns, distortions will grow, and society fails back to the natural rule of violence.
Regulation acts as a barrier to entry only further concentrating the sector by imposing cost on all entrants as a sieve. When the sieve blocks everything, all you have left is collapse in systems that require continual growth to function.
When resources are concentrated in few hands, bad decisions made by the blind result in catastrophic consequence.
The dynamic nature of fiat economies is a simple fact that what goes up must eventually come down, and money printing via preferential debt loans, government subsidies, or other grants play a important part in in ensuring collapse through state-run/dependent apparatus. It might look like a private company, but if its dependent on revenue from a money printer its not, and those with more constraints die off faster. Its like putting a tarp over landscape to kill off everything underneath.
Over time just like with all ponzi's you have several stages. The benefit stage (boom), the diminishing returns stage (sideways), and the bust stage (where outflows exceed inflows). We are now entering stage 3, and as a nation will exceed debt growth vs. GDP within the next 5 years. This fundamentally violates Adam Smith's requirements for producers, and after such a point no market can exist. The economy collapses to non-market socialism which is categorically known to fail.
Normal business can't compete with a money printer, and so they are crowded out leaving a barren shrinking marketplace. Telltale signs of ruin yet to come.
Importantly, Ludwig von Mises warned about this in his 1930s works on Socialism, which was a failure study of the structures involved in bureacracy, and marxism, which apply broadly to all centralized systems involving people. It largely remains un-refuted today (100 years later).
When currency fails, production fails. In a disadvantaged environment where you have ecological overshoot (as we have been since the 1970s), what do you suppose happens when the order of society fails? food production fails, and a great dying occurs.
While these dynamics are slow, they are inevitably once primed, and the outcomes will be the consequence of decades of policy created by evil men. Evil simply being defined as the willfully blind, committing destructive acts.
People ought to protect their children's future, not destroy it and their children indirectly by extension, but the latter is exactly what has happened since the boomer generation took political power, and what is to come will be their legacy; assuming some people manage to survive this malthusian reversion.
You have a generation that has distorted the economy to the point where its uneconomical to have children. The old crowded out the resources needed to sustain the next generation, and in most respects there is no fixing this since the act of doing so would require solving 6+ problems that are inherently intractable and impossible (i.e. n-body limited visibility systems), and we are already at the limits to growth. All that awaits is the fall, and agency has been stripped slowly but surely to ensure everyone takes the same ride down.
We are living through some of the darkest times.