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Comment by redis_mlc | Hacker News Reader

> markets have done a better job of feeding people than any centralized planning system has.

I wish HN would take their ECON101 lesson and shove it.

All functioning governments susbsidize local farmers.

The US pays farmers to produce milk and corn, amongst other things. The extra milk is often stockpiled as 5 pound cheese bricks. I've seen them.

There is no "free markets with only comparative advantage" for food.

How's the free market in ventilators and PPE working out for you? Hope you don't queue behind the wrong person at the grocery store.

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A counterexample:

After WWII in Poland, Moscow installed a communist government in Warsaw, which promptly started implementing communist policies. One of the biggest ones was collectivization of farming - taking pieces of land and joining them into massive, state-run farms. After around 10 years of this, the studies started showing that this collectivized farming is so much less efficient than private farming (which didn't receive any subsidies!) that, if the whole country converts to it, there's a risk of nation-wide hunger. Further collectivization was stopped shortly after, even though it was clearly against the official dogma of private property and capitalism being the root of all evil.

Every economy that has tried collective farming, from small to large, has never been able to achieve self-sufficiency in food.

The US economy around 1800 was the first economy in history to produce a consistent food surplus. You can see the results of this in the astonishing increase in the average height of Americans throughout the 19th century.

In the Great Depression, the government ordered the slaughter of millions of hogs in order to try and raise the price of pork.

https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/crops_17.html

> The US economy around 1800 was the first economy in history to produce a consistent food surplus.

Can you provide a source for this claim? Thanks.

Eugene Weber's series of lectures "The Western Tradition".

> The US economy around 1800 was the first economy in history to produce a consistent food surplus.

Poland was a big exporter of food (mostly grain) around XV and XVI century. There was also no hunger in the country, which means that the exported grain constituted a pretty consistent surplus.

Countries have exported food at least since Roman times. Much of the ancient Mediterranean shipping was transporting food.

Hunger was still a constant specter, though.

Consider the rise in height in Americans after this achievement. This doesn't happen without plenty of food available all the time.

I'm old now. It wasn't until a couple years ago that I EVER went 24 hours without food (I was experimenting with fasting). Historically speaking, that is incredible.

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