It's very hard to respond to a piece like this - there are some fallacies in the article, but it's such a feel good piece that responding with logic and historical examples is generally unpalatable to people. After reading such a nice story with no downsides, who wants to hear that maybe the author missed some very important points?
Literally every point in the article is not just positive, but overwhelmingly positive. It shows that there are no downsides, no secondary effects, and no one is losing. The author paints beautiful pictures of happy people, like how the program even helps a young military policeman get married and buy a house -
> “It’s silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food,” an athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. “I’ve been eating here every day for two years. It’s a good way to save money to buy a house so I can get married,” he said with a smile.
I'm really tempted to just pick and choose my battles and leave this article alone. If I was going to respond, I'd post some history of how measures like this start off viable because they only move the equilibrium a tiny bit, but slowly the bureaucracy and entropy sets in and you've got stuff like the corn-in-frigging-everything effect in the USA. Or certain kinds of food don't get grown, because a rival staple is at half price due to subsidies - but then if a pestilence hits, you've got no backup crop. Or I'd point out that every attempt to nationalize farms in history - literally every single one without except that I know of - has decreased food yields and led to famines (Soviets, Nazis, various empires in states of emergencies all tried to take over farming - it always leads to lower production, because politicians don't actually know much about farming)... and the tendency after some successes with a program like this is to expand it, with many potential dangers.
If I were going to take on this article, despite all the overwhelming positive emotions, I'd point out a statement like this is pure Orwell:
> The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean more public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.)
A right to food doesn't mean public handouts? Let me get this straight - the city government gives money and free rent to farmers and businesses and people to fund the program, but that's not necessarily a public handout? WTF?
> It can mean redefining the “free” in “free market” as the freedom of all to participate.
Can we redefine the "social" in "socialism" to mean you only exchange with your friends who you know when you choose to? Can we redefine the "commune" in "communism" to mean that it's all about letting people in communities make their own decisions?
If I was going to say anything about this article, I'd try to highlight the propaganda and inherent dishonesty - every point is positive. It doesn't acknowledge any downsides. It uses blatant doublespeak - "public handouts don't necessarily have to be public handouts" - it tries to redefine words to leave the opposition without any way to explain they dislike the position.
If I was going to take on this article, I'd point all this out and ask the users here - even ones who believe in progressivism - to please tune out and criticize articles like this, because it's not much better than Fox News. It's dishonest. It's propaganda and designed to mislead people.
But - I'd be crazy to take on this article which is filled with all these positive emotions, so I will refrain from doing so and not make any of those arguments.
Actually, it's different from what the Nazis and Soviets were doing (forcing farmers to make whatever they tell them to), and more like what Vietnam and China do. Their governments deed tracts of land to farmers and say "have at it, you keep most of the profit, but you're contracted to this township or hamlet for x amount of produce. Whatever is leftover you charge whatever you want to whomever you want."
The incentivization of ownership empowered the Chinese agrarian economy out from subsistence or "the starving farmer" to one where the farmer owned the means of production but were sharing profit and produce with the state.
I think similar principles apply here, but on the distribution and marketing side rather than the production side. The Belo gov't allots public space for private vending of produce direct from the farm, saving the middleman markups associated. They also have the ABC markets that the farmers bid on for selling their goods at prices set by the state. I'm also sure that the Belo gov't also gets a substantial deal on produce in order to run the "people's" restaurants.
Does it work? Well, agrarian-dominant economies don't stand a chance when every citizen wants to put down the shovel and pick up a laptop to do their work. But, eventually, there is a happy medium.
> Actually, it's different from what the Nazis and Soviets were doing (forcing farmers to make whatever they tell them to), and more like what Vietnam and China do. Their governments deed tracts of land to farmers and say "have at it, you keep most of the profit, but you're contracted to this township or hamlet for x amount of produce. Whatever is leftover you charge whatever you want to whomever you want."
The difference is that the Nazis and Soviets (supposedly)took it all and these folks take an absolute amount X.
What happens when a farm produces less than its X? (To be fair, Nazis and Soviets may have minimum "all" as well.)
> saving the middleman markups associated.
And also forcing the farmer to do sales and distribution in addition to farming. That's time she can't spend farming, relaxing, etc. Note that other people are probably better at sales and distribution, so it's economically inefficient to force the farmer to do those things.
What I found interesting about the article was that the government intervention it’s describing is fairly lightweight: e.g., instead of nationalizing farms, the government is making it easier for farmers to sell directly to urban residents.
Clearly you understand the article as did I. Minimal help from government can be positive without always dissolving in to socialism (the horror) or some Orwellian nightmare.
If I was to respond to lionhearted (which I won't) I would say he's missing the point and overreacting to the message. But that's only if I responded to lionhearted which I won't because his comment was so well written and thoughtful.
That comment uses an odd rhetorical technique -- the poster claims that the article uses "blatant doublespeak"... while ironically writing a long response claiming that he's refusing to write the response that he's writing.
Ok, interesting use of sarcasm (at least I hope that's sarcasm), but I'm not sure why someone would write a counter-argument, when even the post you're responding to is inviting him to make his argument in the first place. ;)
> That comment uses an odd rhetorical technique... writing a long response claiming that he's refusing to write the response that he's writing.
> Ok, interesting use of sarcasm (at least I hope that's sarcasm)
Not quite sarcasm - well, the last line I was joking yes, but there's a reason I wrote like that. After finishing that article, most people will be feeling really good - it's a feel good story. So there's a serious risk that any criticism of the argument is written off without being considered.
So I put it that I would say that stuff if I wasn't afraid of knee jerk reactions which ideally makes people do two things - first, consider the arguments without knee-jerk dismissing them. Second and more importantly, I want people to think: Would I knee jerk dismiss arguments here?
That response was actually geared more at progressives and people that would favor those policies than people who don't like them or neutrals. If I was going to write to someone that already thought those policies were bad ideas, I wouldn't have to be delicate. But I really wanted to engage people who care about the world, who are kind hearted, and have them think critically about the effects of this sort of policy.
To do so, I needed to avoid being written off immediately, so I wrote in a way that hopefully gets people to consider the arguments, yes, but also to consider whether they'd have written them off immediately without thinking. Hopefully a reader thinks, "Huh, he did make some good points. Would I write him off as crazy for trying to say those points or would I consider them?" If people can think, "Would I consider those arguments honestly?" we can get into a good discussion and hopefully get at good governance.
Literally every point in the article is not just positive, but overwhelmingly positive. It shows that there are no downsides, no secondary effects, and no one is losing. The author paints beautiful pictures of happy people, like how the program even helps a young military policeman get married and buy a house -
> “It’s silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food,” an athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. “I’ve been eating here every day for two years. It’s a good way to save money to buy a house so I can get married,” he said with a smile.
I'm really tempted to just pick and choose my battles and leave this article alone. If I was going to respond, I'd post some history of how measures like this start off viable because they only move the equilibrium a tiny bit, but slowly the bureaucracy and entropy sets in and you've got stuff like the corn-in-frigging-everything effect in the USA. Or certain kinds of food don't get grown, because a rival staple is at half price due to subsidies - but then if a pestilence hits, you've got no backup crop. Or I'd point out that every attempt to nationalize farms in history - literally every single one without except that I know of - has decreased food yields and led to famines (Soviets, Nazis, various empires in states of emergencies all tried to take over farming - it always leads to lower production, because politicians don't actually know much about farming)... and the tendency after some successes with a program like this is to expand it, with many potential dangers.
If I were going to take on this article, despite all the overwhelming positive emotions, I'd point out a statement like this is pure Orwell:
> The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean more public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.)
A right to food doesn't mean public handouts? Let me get this straight - the city government gives money and free rent to farmers and businesses and people to fund the program, but that's not necessarily a public handout? WTF?
> It can mean redefining the “free” in “free market” as the freedom of all to participate.
Can we redefine the "social" in "socialism" to mean you only exchange with your friends who you know when you choose to? Can we redefine the "commune" in "communism" to mean that it's all about letting people in communities make their own decisions?
If I was going to say anything about this article, I'd try to highlight the propaganda and inherent dishonesty - every point is positive. It doesn't acknowledge any downsides. It uses blatant doublespeak - "public handouts don't necessarily have to be public handouts" - it tries to redefine words to leave the opposition without any way to explain they dislike the position.
If I was going to take on this article, I'd point all this out and ask the users here - even ones who believe in progressivism - to please tune out and criticize articles like this, because it's not much better than Fox News. It's dishonest. It's propaganda and designed to mislead people.
But - I'd be crazy to take on this article which is filled with all these positive emotions, so I will refrain from doing so and not make any of those arguments.