Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

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That's the theory, but in practice it doesn't work that way. Just take oil and gas, for example. The poorest people are certainly not consuming large amounts of petroleum products. For example, consider the US Military - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_Sta...

The primary beneficiaries of this military consumption are the corporations that supply the goods and services that the military pays for (with public money), but the gains made by those corporations go into a relatively few pockets.

Another example is big agriculture corporations. In the US, for decades there have been subsidies paid to corn "farmers" (now big corps), to the extent that the businesses had to find ways to use corn beyond just food. Thus came corn syrup, ethanol (https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_against_ethanol_bad_...) and more.

Beneficiaries of this, again, are a few people. Meanwhile, land is burned out (soil quality reduced to worthless), plus all the infrastructure and energy use related to operating large scale farms.

If I had all day to spend, I could probably find a dozen other examples.

This has nothing to do with cheap food for poor people; and after all, the research shows that the cheap food is the unhealthiest.

>The primary beneficiaries of this military consumption are the corporations that supply the goods and services that the military pays for (with public money), but the gains made by those corporations go into a relatively few pockets.

Why do you consider the primary beneficiaries of an activity that consumes resources the ones who supply the resources? Surely, the beneficiaries from the activity itself are the primary beneficiaries. Or to put this into context: the primary beneficiaries of the military are the people and trade that the military protects. The primary beneficiary from the military's use of helmets aren't helmet manufacturers, but rather the soldiers using the helmets.

>Another example is big agriculture corporations. In the US, for decades there have been subsidies paid to corn "farmers" (now big corps), to the extent that the businesses had to find ways to use corn beyond just food.

And cheap food benefits nobody? I would imagine that if the food they produce is so cheap that they have to find other avenues of using it that this would benefit people who have trouble affording food.

>This has nothing to do with cheap food for poor people;

It has everything to do with cheap food and goods. Without these economies of scale a chicken sandwich would cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. If you had to gather all of the ingredients yourself then it would be incredibly expensive.

>and after all, the research shows that the cheap food is the unhealthiest.

I wouldn't call potatoes and rice the unhealthiest foods. Nowadays we consider some foods unhealthy because they are so plentiful - because that are cheap. People tend to overindulge in them which makes them "unhealthy". Most of the time it's a question of how much is consumed.

So increasing taxes to pay politicians and their cronies who have been making those very decisions is the solution?

Wait, wait even better - making everything more expensive for everyone is going to somehow disproportionately benefit those who have less over those who have more? I've little doubt the absurdity of taxing ourselves to prosperity certainly sounds perfectly reasonable to people who stand to benefit from it, along with their parasitic electorate.

This is why climate change quackery keeps falling short - it's statist propaganda brought to you for the same people who created all current imbalance by the people aspiring to be their next crony beneficiaries

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