Originally Posted by emilya
If there are really people out there who have decided that for the good of the human race we need to starve a certain percentage of folks so that the others can survive, then let me off. I don't want to be here anymore.
I don't believe this. Yes, food is being horded... but much much more is destroyed. Farmers are regularly being paid by the government to NOT farm their land! Why is this, you ask?
There is a conspiracy, but it is not happening where 99% of non-economists believe it is. The conspiracy is powered by farm subsidies and it is perpetrated on the world economy by the huge Farm Lobby and those it supports, both in politics and in the fields. Right now, Rice, Milk, tobacco, soybeans, feed grains, peanuts, cotton, wheat... and many others are being subsidized by the Federal government here in the USA.
It is hard to explain basic microeconomics to laymen but if you can believe what I say next, then you can see that the truth is that this is not the conspiracy that you read about in the Drudge report, but an economic reality that is a direct result of government subsidies. In any market economy, when government subsidizes the production of a good, it creates an increase in supply and a surplus that the economy can not purchase. It is actually cheaper to the world economy (less dead weight loss) to destroy this surplus or just pay the farmers not to produce, rather than try to warehouse it. If the world economy could support this added surplus, it would. There is only so much money to go around. The only people that gain here are the lobbies and the producers involved in this scam on the world's population.
If we got government out of the farm business entirely and allowed the markets to set an equilibrium price and quantity on all these goods, the world would be a much better place. Prices would fall and production would become much more efficient. Sadly however, government has become a quid pro quo environment where the farm lobby has amassed enough funds to be able to put politicians in their pockets and keep this fraud going. We drastically need to clean house.
Emmie