Some Thoughts on Food, Healthcare, and Equality From Economist Robert Higgs

I think this is great food (get it?) for thought.

Lots of folks won’t like this post.

“Isn’t it high time that the USA adopted a single-payer system of food insurance. After all, nothing is more important than food; no one can survive more than a few days without eating. Leaving the provision of food to the whims and caprices of the free market is simply a recipe for malnutrition and starvation. And obviously the poor and the minorities have very little access to food under horse-and-buggy market arrangements.

Time to buy old US gold coins

Under the proposed system, the government would establish a National Feeding System (NFS) to which everyone would be required to belong and make premium payments. Everyone engaged in producing and distributing food would be drafted into the system. Whenever anyone got hungry, he would present himself to a licensed provider, who would be authorized to provide stipulated types of food, the costs of which would be billed to the NFS at prices the agency had established. Only foods the NFS had found to be necessary for the individual eater would be provided and their costs reimbursed.

This system would permit great reductions in administrative costs. Unnecessary duplication (e.g., 75 different kinds of breakfast cereal, 27 different kinds of yogurt, etc.) would be eliminated. The poor, at long last, would all get adequate food; the rich would get the same food, thereby ensuring equity and equal dignity at the dinner table. Farm organizations would no longer be required, because all farmers would be organized into vast collective farms where government managers would ensure that only the best methods, seeds, fertilizers, and so forth were used, according to strict government requirements based on settled science.

Would not this arrangement be a huge improvement over the anarchy of the present means of food supply and distribution? What could possibly go wrong?”

– Robert Higgs