I didn’t communicate very well there. What I meant is that there is not one reason for ‘central planning’, and different central planners have different motives.
Mao’s Great Leap Forward was motivated by a desire to pull his country into the industrial age. He managed to kill 40-50 million people in the attempt. On the other hand, European central planners are trying to solve climate change and intentionally reduce industrial activity. Central planners in the U.S. and Canada seem more fixed on social issues. There’s no one reason for ‘central planning’.
The ‘stupid shit’ they did was to go after the landowner-farmers (the Kulaks) because they thought giant collective farms were more ‘scientific’ and could be managed by central planners more effectively. So they killed and imprisoned a lot of people, took away ownership of the land, and turned it over to ‘the people’ in the form of collective farms.
As it turns out, eliminating the people who know the land and what farming practices work best in the local area, and replacing them with bureaucratic collectives run by party hacks with peasant labor who have no skin in the game is not the big efficienncy win they thought it would be, and farm output plummeted during a period of great weather for harvest. So, they had to plunder the Ukraine of its food to keep Russian citizens from revolting against the government, at the expense of 20-40 million more lives.
Today, the WEF thinks it would be a good idea to kick farmers off their lands and build giant ‘food innovation hubs’ instead. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Central planners especially hate small businesses, independent farmers, and landowners because they have money and power and can’t be controlled by the central planners. They’d much rather deal with Monsanto and their ilk, who are totaly willing to do the planner’s bidding so long as they are compensated well for it, just like the Russians got rid of the Kulaks because they were competing power centers in villages at the time.
You’re right - the free market would work much better without those government distortions. For example, we’d be producing food on land that now produces corn for ethanol if it weren’t for government subsidy.
New Zealand had one of the best farming systems in the world. Then they elected a government that decided to ‘improve’ agriculture and ‘protect’ the farmers. They did this by heavily subsidizing fertilizer and feed, and by subsidizing farmers by the amount of grazing land they had. They also fixed the price of veal to ‘protect’ the farmers from fluctuating world prices.
Farmers responded by over-fertilizing the land, polluting the rivers. They increased their ‘grazing land’ by putting sheep in places that would have been uneconomic without subsidy. And cheap feed and a guaranteed per-pound price for sheep caused overfeeding, causing a decline in the quality of the meat. New Zealand veal plummeted in demand, and the government resorted to buying the sheep and reducing them to tallow.
Subsidy and government intervention just about destroyed New Zealand agriculture. What saved them was that the government went broke. All subsidies were ended, and farmers screamed that it was the end of the world. What actually happened is that farmers re-learned efficient practices, had to raise their sheep in a competitive global market and used their land more efficiently. New Zealand agriculture rapidly returned to its former glory, and its veal became very desirable again. New Zealand’s farm sector became much healthier without government ‘help’ than with it.
Today, the government is ‘helping’ agriculture in The Netherlands by demanding that nitrogen fertilizer use be reduced by 30-90% depending on region. They think they know better how to run agriculture more efficiently than do the people who have made the tiny Netherlands the #2 food producer in the world and #1 in Europe.
They admit this will put over 1,000 small farmers out of business, but ‘food innovation hubs’ can take their place. Canada wants to do the same thing. If they get their way, expect food shortages. Hopefully not famine. It’s going to depend on how far they go before we throw them all out of office.
Government action certainly does affect agriculture. But you seem to assume that the effect is positive, or even necessary for agriculture to function. I have argued that it is the opposite. Farm subsidies are a perfect case of special interests capturing government moey at the expense of the people. We’d all be better off if they went away.