Comment by tynpeddler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tynpeddler | Hacker News Reader

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I wonder if we would be having the same conversation if google had charged publishers to add them to the google news product. Even charging $5 a year seems like it could have completely turned this whole situation on its head. For one it would have offered publishers some contractual protections, but mainly it would have changed the publisher's mindset towards google. Now it's a provider of a service they need, and they do need it.

The problem is that the internet made the "news" market way to efficient. Competition is incredibly fierce because the cost of distribution has plummeted, and because it turns out that most people don't read news for news, they read it for entertainment. If Google were to go away tomorrow, the publishers would be in the exact same position with Bing, DDG, Baidu, or whoever picks up the pieces. The economics have shifted, 90% of publishers are now offering a very low value product.

If governments go out and create this artificial market to prop up the "news" they like, not only will it be prone to corruption (What counts as an eligible publisher? Does Google owe the Daily Sun and the BBC the same amount of money? If it's different, who decides by how much?), but in 30-50 years, we'll be talking about the news subsidies the same way we talk about farm subsidies today; a corrupt and wasteful relic from an era that refused to acknowledge things have changed.

All that being said, the sales tax on digital adds is probably the best idea so far, but enforcement is going to be tricky.

Note: farm subsidies may well be corrupt and wasteful but they exist for national security reasons. A country that can't feed itself is completely vulnerable in times of conflict.

It's implausible that we'd ever not be able to feed ourselves without farm subsidies. About half of our wheat is exported. Even if somehow we dropped more than 50% without farm subsidies, we have enough money that we could import from other countries; even if we faced a global ban on exporting food to the United States, it would not be difficult to begin using more land and labor to grow crops within the span of two years.

It's completely plausible that even a modest drop in price or increase in volatility would make it unprofitable for anyone in the US to produce wheat (or other staples). In a free market, they will just stop doing so, and production will drop to near zero.

You're right that imports would make up the difference, but that's where national security comes in. If you rely on importing your food and your trading partners become adversaries or shipping is disrupted due to war, you're screwed.

In the context of the USA:

We are net exporters of all the major staples. At the very least, we can ratchet down subsidies until we are no longer a net exporter of agricultural products; that level of production is sufficient to handle all our essentials.

> If you rely on importing your food and shipping is disrupted due to war, you're screwed.

The biggest exporters of agricultural products to the United States are Mexico and Canada, which also have plenty of excess capacity. Even in the unlikely scenario that some geopolitical rival manages to shut down trade across the Pacific and the Atlantic, we wouldn't be in a place where we have to worry about our food. If somehow our rival also had the capacity to shut down transit of goods across our land borders, they also have the capacity to shut down domestic transit of goods. I.e., even having self sufficiency based on farms in Iowa wouldn't help feed anyone on the coasts.

Farm subsidies are a mechanism for transferring tax money to everybody (everybody who eats). It's mostly a form of basic income to provide money to poor masses without the excuse of requiring them to work, so they don't revolt.

Overfarming, exports and food waste are just side effects of this mechanism.

> We are net exporters of all the major staples. At the very least, we can ratchet down subsidies until we are no longer a net exporter of agricultural products; that level of production is sufficient to handle all our essentials.

lol not if a world war happens buddy. regardless of whether we export staples or not (and we eat more than staples), staples taste horrible without spices, which we import at net 60%, and we need more of everything when we're defending liberal values from being wiped off the earth.

The goalposts have shifted from "having enough food to feed ourselves" to "having enough exotic spices."

Even if we took that argument as compelling, it doesn't explain why we should subsidize wheat and corn instead of said exotic spices.

> The goalposts have shifted from "having enough food to feed ourselves" to "having enough exotic spices."

boo hoo. I never set the first goal posts, nor the second that you imply. They're all only components of maintaining quality of life for our constituents and fellow citizens in a probability distribution of predictable things, including so-called 'black swan' events.

The risk of ending wheat/corn subsidies is so much higher than having them in the first place...

Won’t all the equipment and land (the expensive inputs to farming) still exist if prices drop? Without subsidies, some farmers may become insolvent, but either they will be able to restructure their debt or someone will buy the operation with a cheaper cost structure. Aren’t the same principles at play as in oil extraction or production of any other commodity? If production drops, prices will go back up, and someone will produce to meet the demand. Certainly this would be a cold reality for family farmers, but I don’t see how it results in the US not having any food producers.

The labor and domain knowledge might be lost in a generation. In the same way that the US has lost a ton of manufacturing knowledge, to the point that entire supply chains cannot exist within the country.

The US is far from the only country with farm subsidies. Some of those countries (e.g., Switzerland) are in fact not self-sufficient.

> US is far from the only country with farm subsidies

Democracies with lots of farmland, i.e. ones with reduced food security risk, have farm subsidies because they have lots of voting farmers.

It's sort of like how you shouldn't let the national reserve of masks go empty, even if they had not been needed for about 100 years.

The thing about farms is that you can't just start producing stuff right away. It takes months to actually grow out a crop, you need a seed stock ready, and you just can't deal with sudden shocks.

So you have to be always prepared because if you're not, even just for a few years, it can bite you in the ass.

There is no evidence that continuous farm subsidies maintain agricultural output. (That’s mostly correlated to political stability and trade policy.)

Periodic stability mechanisms, yes. But that is the vast minority of farm subsidies.

And the whole amount of farm subsidies that go to alfalfa and cotton and tobacco fail to rise to this argument. Farm subsidies are about buying off a voting bloc. (Disclaimer: I own farmland as an investment.)

I don't think anyone is arguing that there are some subsidies like that or that some are wasteful--you can see as much in the first few posts.

They're arguing that the idea isn't categorically absurd.

I’m not arguing they’re absurd. They’re always going to be present in democracies with agricultural sectors. But if you don’t own farmland, farm subsidies are principally (to the tune of something like 85%, in America, more in Japan and Switzerland) a transfer mechanism. Not national security spending.

That said, they’re political gold and so very reliable. Hence why I own farmland. (It doesn’t grow anything.)

The point is to not have to depend on imports. Food is definitely something you want to have in surplus. "Two years" isn't a great length of time to be hungry.

That's not to say our subsidies are targeted well. Not only do we have surplus to export, we have surplus to cram into our own mouths, causing an obesity crisis. We'd be well advised to tune the subsidies to healthier foods. We would still have a wide surplus against a crisis, while eating better.

But unfortunately, long-term dependence on subsidies and some historical accidents of politics have given the existing beneficiaries a very heavy thumb on the scale of decision-making in agricultural policy.

Shhhhhh, you are giving 2020 ideas. And the point isn't that we'd not be able to spin up farms, it's that we'd run out of food before that could be accomplished.

In the context of the USA:

The hypothetical where a geopolitical rival has the capacity to shut down shipping across the entirety of the Atlantic and the Pacific isn't something that will enter the realm of plausibility within the next 5 years or so. 5 years is plenty of time to spin up farms.

That's also ignoring the fact that whether we'd even need to spin up farms in a world without subsidies is an open question.

The countries to which we export agricultural products -could not feed themselves- without -our- wheat/soy/corn/etc.

Thats the national security issue.

The largest importers of US agricultural goods are Canada, China, Mexico, and the E.U. Will China collapse if all of a sudden it faces a pork shortage?

> Will China collapse if all of a sudden it faces a pork shortage?

I think the CCP considers securing pork from price shocks to be of vital national importance. It's part of the implicit bargain they've made with the population.

Can't you apply that logic to most industries?

Depends on the industry. Could a country make do without textiles imports for a couple of years during a conflict? Probably. Could it do without food? Probably not.

> Note: farm subsidies may well be corrupt and wasteful but they exist for national security reasons. A country that can't feed itself is completely vulnerable in times of conflict.

It's not that different: "news subsidies may well be corrupt and wasteful but they exist for national security reasons. A country that can't agree on what's happening cannot agree on what to do, therefore it's completely vulnerable..."

Except that it's difficult for a farm to actively reduce a country's ability to feed itself, since everyone mostly agrees on what constitutes diseased or poisoned food, and can recognize such, by people getting sick if nothing else.

That may be true.

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