Agreed. The market should decide if beef consumption is viable. Ultimately energy is the basis all food production. Cheap and plentiful energy solves the food production and distribution problem, then its just matter of preferences.
https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...
Tofu and ethanol may be more price-distorted by the US government than is beef, but I dunno how to quickly support that idea with hard data beyond what I cited above.
Also, how much does beef benefit from cheap feed prices (corn and soy) due to subsidies as well?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000703112
If the intent of the government is to pour subsidies into domestic beef production to stabilize prices they're doing a crap job.
Compare corn: https://www.macrotrends.net/2532/corn-prices-historical-char...
The market has decided, ant it decided that the well off are more important than the rest so they get what they want at everyone elses expense.
Maybe we should stop thinking market forces are in any way right or moral. At least saying 'I got mine, fuck you' would be honest.
2. atrocious calorie to protein ratio due to carbs. I imagine eating a pound (dry weight!) of any legume every day would get real old real fast.
3. phytoestrogens. not just soy, all legumes are full of them, even peanuts.
2. i imagine eating a pound of most unprocessed food sources would be bad, tofu and tempeh are very competitive and have macros similar to egg or cheese
3. not sure where you're going with this? surely you're not referencing the well debunked claim that soy feminizes men or something?
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I'm not even vegan and I make plenty of room for soy derived foods in my diet because the benefits are so concrete. It helps with muscle recovery and inflammation via soy isoflavones, and the gut health benefit from diversifying protein sources is very important. It has marginally less leucine, but I am ingesting 200g of protein a day because I actually lift so that really doesn't matter.
pray tell, which part is deboonked - that xenohormones disrupt our own hormone production, or that legumes and some other plants contain a lot of phytoestrogens?
If India and Bangladesh hadn’t fucked around with socialism for decades after independence, we could have reached the same point many years ago. Millions of children would have been saved. Talk about immorality.
...but Bangladesh's success is purely attributable to markets? It's not "a Bangladesh thing"?
You might want to check your prejudices there.
Pakistan faces the same cultural problem as Afghanistan and parts of the middle east: in large parts of the country, extended kinship groups dominate society, precluding the development of civic institutions and functioning government. That’s not true for the whole country. Parts of Pakistan are culturally like India or Bangladesh: it has a long history of governance by central institutions, even if that governance is dysfunctional. Imagine if 50% of the U.S. population was Appalachians. The U.S. would be a much less successful country also.
...I'ma stop you there.
There really isn't.
And you'll get a lot farther in life if you stop thinking of real people and their development and culture as video game abstractions.
Oh, it’s far too late for that. As the kids say, he’s cooked. He’ll be complaining about hypothetical Appalachians invading New England or New York or the United States (all actual examples, see below) in the nursing home.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
People whose brains are as soft as their hearts sell false equality, but its harmful. It’s like telling the obese person they’re great and that their problems are due to “bad genetics” or factors outside their control. It’s a polite lie and it is damaging.
Understanding that culture is just a type of technology is how you get miracles like Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20045923. He thought culture was destiny, and he harnessed that realization to make his culture rich.
The market is not moral, it is amoral and it serves those with the money to direct it.
Scandinavian countries have highly market oriented economies. Denmark and Norway are in the top 10 in Heritage Foundation’s economic freedom index and Sweden is #11. Capitalism is what generates the surplus to feed the socialists in Scandinavia.
Without it, you get the US. You get the life your wealth dictates, if you're not wealthy, you didn't deserve life.
Sweden's costs for insulin are over 10 times lower than that of the US, because the US let the free market decide and Sweden has a socialist political system.
At a place I lived earlier, my neighbour got out of the hospital after heart surgery with a $100k medical bill that they never recovered from. My dad had heart surgery in Canada and left the hospital with a $150 parking bill.
But no, please lets continue to try and argue the free market is moral and just.
Sweden doesn’t achieve lower prices for insulin through “socialism” or regulation. In Sweden, middle class people tax themselves heavily to pay for insulin for poor people. It has nothing to do with free market versus socialism. It’s free-market capitalism with very high taxes on individuals and low taxes on capital and corporation.
> But no, please lets continue to try and argue the free market is moral and just.
It is just and moral. Before Sweden had the free market, it was poor as shit and one quarter of the population of Sweden came to America. Whatever socialism you think Sweden has now, it got only after becoming rich through capitalism.
I know they’ve gotten a lot else right of course
Today, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea are rich, and China is getting there. Multiple dirt poor Asian countries getting rich within a few generations thanks to One Simple Trick!
Market reforms helped. But those reforms could not have happened unless the state did sensible things
Those same market reforms impoverished the entire middle class in New Zealand, where the state did not do sensible things (the reverse)
Markets are good at fully allocating resources, which feudalism and central planning is not. But they also concentrate wealth into the hands of very few (that is what wrecked New Zealand's middle class) and it takes deliberate government policy to avert that.
The state did almost nothing sensible! Bangladesh’s government, and the culture of the people more generally, is one of the most dysfunctional in the whole world. We just overthrew our government again! The free market is just a hardy plant growing in inhospitable ground as long as you don’t completely strangle it.
I agree that market reforms have been great for most countries that adopt it, provided they have stable and competent institutions.
However, it doesn't make sense to attribute decrease in child mortality to "market reforms". Cuba, Russia/USSR, North Korea all have seen huge declines in child mortality since 1960.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN?end=2006...
But yeah, we can keep focusing on the farting cows, that’s the problem.
Fine by me though, add in the environmental costs for almonds too. Would you support an initiative of pricing these externalities on food, or is it just a snarky comment about cow farts?
Is the water use from almonds a problem or is it fine and any changes would be “fucking the water supply”?
Until The Market™, especially in the US, starts dealing with externalities (like climate change), it should not. Something like carbon pricing (per Greenspan and Volcker):
* https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_Car...
Even Mr. Free Market himself, Milton Friedman, thought a price on pollution was a good idea: