Well, for a starter I would consider everyone starving to death to be bad - sufficiently bad to merit increased government initiation of force (whatever that means).
There are of course other scenarios that justify government action, but I only need one to state that ‘minimized government initiation of force’ is not a universally optimal metric.
What do you mean by “universally optimal metric”? Do you believe any metric is “universally optimal” and not arbitrary? My claim was not that my arbitrary metric was universal, but that my metric is minimized by a free market.
The free market does minimize starvation, though. It does so by maximizing long-run production through capital investment and the division of labor.
The family farm has not really been a viable business model since the great depression. It was largely that that caused the economic hardship in the first place.
We can drive ourselves into a new depression trying to keep family farms afloat, or we can recognize the reality of the situation, and see that, like all industries, there are benefits from efficiencies of scale, and reverse the 20% corporate 80% private ownership.
There is a niche for the small family farm, just as there is a niche for small automakers or small retail stores. However, there is also a need for bulk production of food, which is made least efficient when you have millions of people duplicating efforts that can be combined.
I think the liberal position would be: let the inefficient soybean farmers fail, but make sure there are safety nets that allow them to survive & train for other jobs.
Or just don’t get into a trade war in the first place.
Hey man, you’re the one who (rather bizarrely) suddenly started asking me to start proposing competing metrics. Don’t ask me what sort of standards should be used for this discussion of yours.
Myself, I’ve moment ago said that I’m basically fine with allowing the heartless hand of the free market crush the farmers in its steely grip. So long as it’s not detrimental to society, that is - and it appears the rest of us can get along just fine. So screw 'em! Just as the free market demands.
Well you said free market outcomes are not always optimal. I disagreed and explained why by giving my metric and asked what your metric was. Sometimes when someone says something is not optimal, they are just using a rhetorical flourish to say they don’t like it. Sometimes they have a metric in mind. In that case, ideally, we can all come together objectively and decide under what conditions that metric is optimized.
Oh ok, hi-five.
What’s gonna happen to all the soybeans? Is the government going to just give money to the farmers and get nothing in return, buy the soybeans at above-market rates and store them, buy them and let them rot, or pay the farmers not to plant? It’s easy to just call it welfare, but the details intrigue me. And some of the options make the government look stupider than others.
I don’t think they’ll starve, but I hope they like soybeans.
This ain’t really the thread to do a full-on rebuttal of the fantasy that the free market fixes everything optimally and makes rainbows and unicorns fly out of everyone’s butts. For the purpose of this thread I refuse to use examples unrelated to farms, farmers, and farm subsidies, so everybody starving is the example I’ve got. If that doesn’t do it for you (and if we all agree that it’s awesome that inefficient farmers are driven out of the market forced to eat each other to survive) then as far as this thread is concerned I got nothin’.
The free market is the best because the free market is the free market?
Just a heads up that I’m back at work tomorrow and will be giving this thread much less attention. I don’t like to start threads that I can’t keep contributing to, but that may be the case here. It’s too bad – I was hoping to see some defense of the policy (I saw some sort-of half-hearted defenses), especially from some of our biggest 45 fans.
I’d still love a definitive answer as to whether this is really an increase or just a renamed status quo. If it’s an increase, I’m agin’ it. If it’s the status quo, I’d like to do a preemptive Ha Ha to those supporters that bought it as actual help.
RS
Let’s see Student loan debt $1.5 trillion
Credit card debt $1 trillion.
Fairly comparable there.
At least with your credit card debt, hopefully you got something of value. 
It would be better if you took into account the number of holders of the debt. I would imagine there are fewer student loan holders than credit card debt holders.
Hell I’d even hazard a guess they overlap.
If the bailout is run like every other governmental farming subsidy - all of the above. $12B is nothing compared to the farm losses trump has caused. Hell, we’ve lost $12B in soybeans just in Kansas alone. And we aren’t ever going to get those markets back, at least not in our lifetimes. There is already over-production in corn and wheat. Just what are those farmers supposed to plant and where are they supposed to sell it?
Tell 'em to plant Democratic this fall.
They better figure out something, because we are about one growing season away from another Dust Bowl. The fields can’t just lay fallow, not with increased weather due to climate change.
That would result in a heck of a lot more people victimized and a heck of a lot less people benefitted than what we currently have. It’d also result in the complete destruction of the free market. You cannot hold both “minimal governmental intervention” and “absolute free market” as absolute virtues, because they conflict.
New or not, the $12 billion is a drop in the ocean of lost ag profits. However, it does come with some spiffy new hats:
“Trump said he just had the new hats made.”
… in China.
Well, since Chinese-made goods are now more expensive here, that creates an opportunity for Americans to become competitive in those areas. I suggest the farmers plant iPhones.