The more people you want to feed, the more money it costs.
Food production is not free. Food distribution is not free.
If you have an alternative to capitalism, I’m open, but you can’t just stamp your feet and go “but it should be free!” It’s not, someone has to pay for the seed, irrigation, fertilization, equipment fuel and labor involved in production and distribution.
p.s. Is it just me or is it the same people wanting $20+ hour minimum wage who also think food should be free?
The more people you want to feed, the more money it costs.
Food production is not free. Food distribution is not free.
Then it should be a task of the State, as “feeding people” is, quite obviously, a task Too Big to Fail. And, as such, the State can (and should) just automatically print the money needed to reward the work done. Feeding the hungry should not depend on a “budget”. A budget is basically putting a price on human lives.
Of course, but maybe destroying the modern economy is a good thing. Things like serving essential needs causing hyperinflation showcases that modern economy is purposefully built to make people lose. No matter what you try to do to help society, something (or rather, someone) counterplays you.
IMO the real solution is that things that are essential, like food and health, should not depend on money exchange to be provided, period. Sure, producers of food and providers of health should be paid for their work, but that payment should not have a codependence with the fact that the hungry or unhealthy person get the attention they need.
that things that are essential, like food and health, should not depend on money exchange to be provided, period.
The problem with that is the people providing the food and health services still need to survive.
Doctors need to pay their rent. Farmers need to buy feed, seed, and fertilizer. Everyone pays for water.
So once you go down the road of making it impossible to charge for services that need to bring in money to literally keep the lights on, you collapse the economy, and no, that’s NOT a good thing. That road leads to chaos and death.
I’m not saying doctors et all should not be paid for their work. I’m saying it should not depend on a money transaction on the afflicted citizen. I think it’s perfectly feasible to, for example, have the State pay for things that are essential, it’s kind of the entire role of the State after all. Or even better, give doctors and providers of those services the same treatment as in not collecting from them for stuff.
Also, if there’s such things as “companies Too Big To Fail should be handed over to the State”, then that also applies to Tasks Too Big To Fail. Like, you know, keeping your citizens alive. I insist: the core task of the State is to keep the Country alive.
If that collapses the economy, IMO that’s an indicative that the economy model is not good, or perhaps even unethical.
It does however get considerably cheaper to produce more food when production is scaled up. If enough people got together on the “free food” they could potentially do it cheaper than what capitalism provides.
The issue however is that capitalism has already made food really fucking cheap. It’s actually too cheap. And that is because someone else is paying the true cost of providing it. Obviously the animals who sacrifice the their lives, but also the human workers who also sacrifice their lives, just to bring food for everyone. Everyone eats, nobody gets paid, except for the owners who also do none of the work.
On a per capita basis, yes. But the Doritos that sell for $6 a bag come out of a multi billion dollar organization (Frito Lay, part of Pepsi).
Individuals coming together to produce a single bag of Doritos aren’t going to be able to do it for $6. They need the infrastructure of that multi billion dollar corporation to get there.
Yes, exactly. The problem is to get local produce cheaper than importing global crap. Distribution is a huge part of it. It shouldn’t be cheaper to transport crap food globally than for a domestic producer to deliver quality food, but it is.
I don’t understand how people overlook this so easily.
People acknowledge the amount of work and labor required to produce food and insist food shouldn’t be cheap/free… But then just ignore the fact that we’re paying less money to also move that shit across the globe on giant machinery that had to be produced and burning fuels that had to be extracted and refined.
The thing is, you can’t source enough local produce to support any significant population. I live in a town of 641,162 (2021 numbers), you’re not going to deliver 1,923,486 meals a day, 702,072,390 meals per year, using only local resources. It simply can’t be done.
Even on my property, for two people, I would not be able to produce 6 meals a day every day. I have to bring in outside resources.
Yes, you are correct, food is not free. So does that mean it is good (per your morality) that people starve?
The military is super expensive, but that hasn’t stopped us from deciding all Americans need protection and making that happen.
Capitalism has done some good stuff, but it has also done some bad stuff too. It’s not an all or nothing proposition. I think if the majority of us agree everyone should have access to food, money should be a detail to solve, not a barrier.
The question is, do you think food should be free? Have you ever thought about it seriously?
Morality doesn’t enter into it. If you want something that somebody else puts effort into producing, they need to be compensated for their effort, materials, etc. etc.
I guess you could phrase that as a moral demand. You don’t have free access to the results of someone elses effort.
You want to eat without paying someone? Grow your own food. Nothing stopping you. Oh, but you’ll have to pay for the land, seed, water, fertilizer, animals. Learn how to slaughter and butcher on your own because you can’t pay someone else to teach you those skills. You could learn to hunt, but then you’d have to make your own weapons because even re-loading supplies cost money.
Yes, because if you don’t own the land, you have no right to trespass on it to work that land.
Now, here’s the correct way to do it:
Buy the land and do what you want with it.
Contact the owner of the land and work out an agreement. Maybe they’ll let you use it for free, maybe they’ll take a cut of whatever you produce there, whatever is mutually agreeable.
You don’t have the right to just do whatever you want, and, further, once you put the effort in to do something with that land, nobody can just take it from you because they feel your work has no value.
For example…
I have a fence that faces a busy road. It’s on my property and just sits there, it provides privacy for my home.
Someone asked if it was OK to hang carpets on my fence and try to sell them.
I told them “Sure, kick me 5% of the sales and you can do what you want.”
Never heard from them again. If they hadn’t asked me, I’d have trespassed them. If they wanted to negotiate, I’d have been open to that too.
Interesting that you say people should grow their own food yet want to prevent them from having the means to readily do so like this. It’s sad really and kinda evil.
Nothing prevents them from having the means to grow their own food. The trick is being able to do it sustainably for a long period of time.
My house sits on 0.16 acres, 6,970sqft. I could turn that land over to growing food. But the problem is, growing food is a full time job and if I spend all my time growing food for my wife and myself, I’m not making money to pay the mortgage, and soon I have nothing.
I could pay someone else to grow my food, they aren’t going to do it for free, but if I’m going to do that, I may as well keep my property as it is (not much you can grow on 0.16 acres) and just buy my food at a store.
Ok, so it sounds like in your case, the market is morality, if I am understanding you. So you would be cool with buying and selling slaves and paying hit men to kill people? All that would be good because everyone was paid?
You’re making a disingenous slippery slope argument. The law isn’t about morality either, it’s about what is and is not legal.
Slavery isn’t illegal because it’s immoral, it’s illegal because one person doesn’t have the right to take away another persons self determination. You can choose to hire them, and they can choose to work for you, but you can’t force them to do anything.
By the same reason, you don’t have the right to take another persons food without paying them for it. That’s theft.
No, I am not making a slippery slope argument. I am just trying to understand your moral framework, or see if you have any.
Yes, lets talk about laws, maybe that will help. Ok, laws are not just some magic thing that happens, they are developed by society, right?
In fact you can argue that laws are related to morality. In a truly democratic society laws would derivative of morality, right?
Humans develop constructs like laws and capitatim to help us do things. So it is important for us to not derive our morality from existing structures, because if we did, we could never evolve them in a way to help us do more/better things. I know this is kind of abstract and I am sorry about that.
So you are using existing laws and economic systems to argue for the correctness of the current laws and economic systems. Using this approach I could argue that that Feudalism is pretty awesome because it is way better than the stone age, etc…
This is why I am wondering if you have given any thought to your moral frame work, or if you have just accepted the status quo and are trying to justify it because you don’t have a framework.
I don’t have the right to just plug the guy. That would be illegal. He has the right to be in public, swinging around a machete.
Now, if he’s swinging it AT ME or someone else, or chasing them or threatening them, then it’s a different deal and my right to be safe in a public space supercedes his right to wave his arms in the air like he just don’t care.
Again, laws are not present to pick moral winners and losers.
I completely disagree. Why are there laws to prevent people from killing each other? Why would we as a society bother to make that a thing? It’s morality. It’s the basis of everything.
If the most common moral framework didn’t hold that human life is valuable. Then we wouldn’t make those laws. It wouldn’t make sense for those laws to be on the books.
And yes the laws do and should pick winners and losers. If you are a serial killer, the laws are not in your favor, your a loser.
There are laws against killing because you don’t have the right to deprive another sentient being of their right to live and potentially contribute something to society as a whole (even if that contribution is merely to serve as a bad example.)
Again, laws are not moral or immoral, that’s not why we have laws. Cheating on your significant other is immoral, it’s not illegal. There are a whole host of things people consider to be immoral based on their own upbringing or religion that are not illegal.
Attempting to legislate morality is a fast way to failure. See the 18th and 21st amendments to the Constitution.
“Our labor has conquered scarcity”…
Bro they’ve conquered scarcity now? I didn’t even know! If someone has conquered the universal reality of scarcity they can ask whatever they want as minimum wage. 🤣
It costs money to produce food.
The more people you want to feed, the more money it costs.
Food production is not free. Food distribution is not free.
If you have an alternative to capitalism, I’m open, but you can’t just stamp your feet and go “but it should be free!” It’s not, someone has to pay for the seed, irrigation, fertilization, equipment fuel and labor involved in production and distribution.
p.s. Is it just me or is it the same people wanting $20+ hour minimum wage who also think food should be free?
Then it should be a task of the State, as “feeding people” is, quite obviously, a task Too Big to Fail. And, as such, the State can (and should) just automatically print the money needed to reward the work done. Feeding the hungry should not depend on a “budget”. A budget is basically putting a price on human lives.
Great, you just caused hyperinflation for everything else and destroyed the economy.
https://www.netsuite.com/portal/resource/articles/business-strategy/hyperinflation.shtml
Of course, but maybe destroying the modern economy is a good thing. Things like serving essential needs causing hyperinflation showcases that modern economy is purposefully built to make people lose. No matter what you try to do to help society, something (or rather, someone) counterplays you.
IMO the real solution is that things that are essential, like food and health, should not depend on money exchange to be provided, period. Sure, producers of food and providers of health should be paid for their work, but that payment should not have a codependence with the fact that the hungry or unhealthy person get the attention they need.
The problem with that is the people providing the food and health services still need to survive.
Doctors need to pay their rent. Farmers need to buy feed, seed, and fertilizer. Everyone pays for water.
So once you go down the road of making it impossible to charge for services that need to bring in money to literally keep the lights on, you collapse the economy, and no, that’s NOT a good thing. That road leads to chaos and death.
Le eCoNoMy muh gDp
those leeches can fuck off
I’m not saying doctors et all should not be paid for their work. I’m saying it should not depend on a money transaction on the afflicted citizen. I think it’s perfectly feasible to, for example, have the State pay for things that are essential, it’s kind of the entire role of the State after all. Or even better, give doctors and providers of those services the same treatment as in not collecting from them for stuff.
Also, if there’s such things as “companies Too Big To Fail should be handed over to the State”, then that also applies to Tasks Too Big To Fail. Like, you know, keeping your citizens alive. I insist: the core task of the State is to keep the Country alive.
If that collapses the economy, IMO that’s an indicative that the economy model is not good, or perhaps even unethical.
Then just take money away from the rich, ezpz
I think you’ll find they hold on to it harder than you think. ;)
Some really good books on the topic everyone should read, super interesting stuff:
Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super-Rich–and Cheat Everybody Else
Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With The Bill
The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use “Plain English” to Rob You Blind
It does however get considerably cheaper to produce more food when production is scaled up. If enough people got together on the “free food” they could potentially do it cheaper than what capitalism provides.
The issue however is that capitalism has already made food really fucking cheap. It’s actually too cheap. And that is because someone else is paying the true cost of providing it. Obviously the animals who sacrifice the their lives, but also the human workers who also sacrifice their lives, just to bring food for everyone. Everyone eats, nobody gets paid, except for the owners who also do none of the work.
On a per capita basis, yes. But the Doritos that sell for $6 a bag come out of a multi billion dollar organization (Frito Lay, part of Pepsi).
Individuals coming together to produce a single bag of Doritos aren’t going to be able to do it for $6. They need the infrastructure of that multi billion dollar corporation to get there.
Yes, exactly. The problem is to get local produce cheaper than importing global crap. Distribution is a huge part of it. It shouldn’t be cheaper to transport crap food globally than for a domestic producer to deliver quality food, but it is.
I don’t understand how people overlook this so easily.
People acknowledge the amount of work and labor required to produce food and insist food shouldn’t be cheap/free… But then just ignore the fact that we’re paying less money to also move that shit across the globe on giant machinery that had to be produced and burning fuels that had to be extracted and refined.
The thing is, you can’t source enough local produce to support any significant population. I live in a town of 641,162 (2021 numbers), you’re not going to deliver 1,923,486 meals a day, 702,072,390 meals per year, using only local resources. It simply can’t be done.
Even on my property, for two people, I would not be able to produce 6 meals a day every day. I have to bring in outside resources.
And outsourcing this solves the problem how? You’re just making someone else deal with your locality’s problem.
It’s not just my locality, it’s any locality more than, say 50-100 people.
It cost <insert human created construct> to feed people so let’s let them starve instead. Nice one.
It cost human labor to feed people. Can’t be more human created than that
https://www.scribbr.com/fallacies/slippery-slope-fallacy/
Brooklynman fallacy
Yes, you are correct, food is not free. So does that mean it is good (per your morality) that people starve? The military is super expensive, but that hasn’t stopped us from deciding all Americans need protection and making that happen.
Capitalism has done some good stuff, but it has also done some bad stuff too. It’s not an all or nothing proposition. I think if the majority of us agree everyone should have access to food, money should be a detail to solve, not a barrier.
The question is, do you think food should be free? Have you ever thought about it seriously?
Morality doesn’t enter into it. If you want something that somebody else puts effort into producing, they need to be compensated for their effort, materials, etc. etc.
I guess you could phrase that as a moral demand. You don’t have free access to the results of someone elses effort.
You want to eat without paying someone? Grow your own food. Nothing stopping you. Oh, but you’ll have to pay for the land, seed, water, fertilizer, animals. Learn how to slaughter and butcher on your own because you can’t pay someone else to teach you those skills. You could learn to hunt, but then you’d have to make your own weapons because even re-loading supplies cost money.
So, one has to pay for the means of production including the land, which is just sitting there and required nobody to go to any effort?
You see the problem there?
Yes, because if you don’t own the land, you have no right to trespass on it to work that land.
Now, here’s the correct way to do it:
Buy the land and do what you want with it.
Contact the owner of the land and work out an agreement. Maybe they’ll let you use it for free, maybe they’ll take a cut of whatever you produce there, whatever is mutually agreeable.
You don’t have the right to just do whatever you want, and, further, once you put the effort in to do something with that land, nobody can just take it from you because they feel your work has no value.
For example…
I have a fence that faces a busy road. It’s on my property and just sits there, it provides privacy for my home.
Someone asked if it was OK to hang carpets on my fence and try to sell them.
I told them “Sure, kick me 5% of the sales and you can do what you want.”
Never heard from them again. If they hadn’t asked me, I’d have trespassed them. If they wanted to negotiate, I’d have been open to that too.
Interesting that you say people should grow their own food yet want to prevent them from having the means to readily do so like this. It’s sad really and kinda evil.
Nothing prevents them from having the means to grow their own food. The trick is being able to do it sustainably for a long period of time.
My house sits on 0.16 acres, 6,970sqft. I could turn that land over to growing food. But the problem is, growing food is a full time job and if I spend all my time growing food for my wife and myself, I’m not making money to pay the mortgage, and soon I have nothing.
I could pay someone else to grow my food, they aren’t going to do it for free, but if I’m going to do that, I may as well keep my property as it is (not much you can grow on 0.16 acres) and just buy my food at a store.
Go and plant your crops on someone else’s land and see how you go.
There are such things as community gardens, but there are also rules for said gardens.
Ok, so it sounds like in your case, the market is morality, if I am understanding you. So you would be cool with buying and selling slaves and paying hit men to kill people? All that would be good because everyone was paid?
Have you though about this stuff seriously?
You’re making a disingenous slippery slope argument. The law isn’t about morality either, it’s about what is and is not legal.
Slavery isn’t illegal because it’s immoral, it’s illegal because one person doesn’t have the right to take away another persons self determination. You can choose to hire them, and they can choose to work for you, but you can’t force them to do anything.
By the same reason, you don’t have the right to take another persons food without paying them for it. That’s theft.
No, I am not making a slippery slope argument. I am just trying to understand your moral framework, or see if you have any.
Yes, lets talk about laws, maybe that will help. Ok, laws are not just some magic thing that happens, they are developed by society, right? In fact you can argue that laws are related to morality. In a truly democratic society laws would derivative of morality, right?
Humans develop constructs like laws and capitatim to help us do things. So it is important for us to not derive our morality from existing structures, because if we did, we could never evolve them in a way to help us do more/better things. I know this is kind of abstract and I am sorry about that.
So you are using existing laws and economic systems to argue for the correctness of the current laws and economic systems. Using this approach I could argue that that Feudalism is pretty awesome because it is way better than the stone age, etc…
This is why I am wondering if you have given any thought to your moral frame work, or if you have just accepted the status quo and are trying to justify it because you don’t have a framework.
No, laws have absolutely jack all to do with morality, and when they do (prohibition for example) they inevitably fail.
Laws exist to define which rights supercede other rights.
So, for example, in my state there are three cases where I can use lethal force:
So, I see a dude walking down the street swinging a machete (I live in Portland, it’s not as crazy as you’d think.)
I don’t have the right to just plug the guy. That would be illegal. He has the right to be in public, swinging around a machete.
Now, if he’s swinging it AT ME or someone else, or chasing them or threatening them, then it’s a different deal and my right to be safe in a public space supercedes his right to wave his arms in the air like he just don’t care.
Again, laws are not present to pick moral winners and losers.
I completely disagree. Why are there laws to prevent people from killing each other? Why would we as a society bother to make that a thing? It’s morality. It’s the basis of everything.
If the most common moral framework didn’t hold that human life is valuable. Then we wouldn’t make those laws. It wouldn’t make sense for those laws to be on the books.
And yes the laws do and should pick winners and losers. If you are a serial killer, the laws are not in your favor, your a loser.
There are laws against killing because you don’t have the right to deprive another sentient being of their right to live and potentially contribute something to society as a whole (even if that contribution is merely to serve as a bad example.)
Again, laws are not moral or immoral, that’s not why we have laws. Cheating on your significant other is immoral, it’s not illegal. There are a whole host of things people consider to be immoral based on their own upbringing or religion that are not illegal.
Attempting to legislate morality is a fast way to failure. See the 18th and 21st amendments to the Constitution.
“Our labor has conquered scarcity”… Bro they’ve conquered scarcity now? I didn’t even know! If someone has conquered the universal reality of scarcity they can ask whatever they want as minimum wage. 🤣
Quick, somebody tell the Playstation and Xbox fans… “Naw, naw, it’s cool… we conquered scarcity…” LOL.