Vanna
A one-off emergency function is one thing; but what these statists have in mind is a thorough-going increase in governmental meddling in all aspects of food production, without an inkling of an understanding of the economics of what they are suggesting.

Obviously if we count only the benefits of an action, but not the costs, then anything will seem beneficial, and that is the only reason why their proposals are able to seem anything other than absurd and wasteful.

The idea that food security requires national protectionist measure -, quite apart from the fact it is likely to provoke wars - has the economic understanding completely backwards.

It is the same old fallacy of protectionism, re-birthed. If it were true that the people of Australia would be better off restricting trade in food with people outside Australia, then for the same reason, it would be true if the people of a State within Australia restricted trade with people in the other States. For the same reason, it would be true if the people of a district within a State restricted trade with the people of other districts, and so on down to the level of the household and the individual.

You can't increase food production by reducing the division of labour, which is indeed *the* social principle.

The understanding of the statists is completely back-to-front. In their topsy-turvey world, it is as though the state is responsible for producing all the food and all the value in the world! Their ignorance of the basic essentials of human co-operation is profound.

As a food producer myself, I can easily see how Australia's government restrictions are at least halving my own production. And this is the institution whom the statists blithely assume, without a scintilla of insight or critical thinking, are the solution to food shortages! It's a complete inversion of reality - and if we could account for the negative contribution of all actions of all governments at all levels in all countries worldwide, easily responsible for the entire phenomenon of the food shortages in the world.

I knew an expression of the strong anti-regulation sentiment wouldn't be far away. Thanks Peter Hume for adding this important thread to the discussion. I agree that when intervening in markets Governments often get it spectacularly wrong - witness the Pinkbatts fiasco. But they do also sometimes get it right. It has been argued in many quarters that Australia's relatively strong regulation of the banking sector protected us from the wholesale meltdown of the financial sector that we witnessed in the US and parts of Europe (which, ironically, then demanded a mega-intervention in the form of taxpayer-funded bailouts). So I think carefully designed regulation can be helpful. And it can be designed to have minimal effect on price signals, hence retaining the dynamism of market competition.

MAD has been a theory of military defence for considerable time (Mutually Assured Destruction). In simpler terms ensuring countervailing forces apply prevents an abuse of power, and history demonstrates those with power inevitably abuse their position.

Cribb’s article essentially argues for capacity building, I have argued for knowledge and capacity building. The notion of governments doing other than ensuring countervailing forces within a market seems to be Hume’s invention in this debate.

Is the idea then, if markets are so good, to remove all government restraints whether labour laws, financial regulation and patent/copyright protection and let the winner take all? Let the PIGS go to the wall in Europe – but history teaches all suffer under that scenario.

Yes, governments have a history of being inept. Responsibility lies with voters for that.

Markets as the answer? GFC rather demonstrates markets in their true light. Madagascar faces food shortages, the market allowed Koreans to lease substantial areas of land and take food to Korea. That is the market.

You and Julian Cribb are so right, Cronus. If we listened to the Peter Humes of this world, Paul Ehrlich would have been right, and hundreds of milliions of people would have starved in the 1970s without the Green Revolution, which depended both on government and on private philanthropy. Private companies have responsibilities to their shareholders and will not invest in blue sky research with a low probability of success. Nor will they invest where the benefits of the research cannot be captured for the company, or where they will mainly go to people who cannot pay.

Governments are often inept, but leaving it all up to individuals who need not consider the longer term (due to limited life spans), may be ignorant, and may have vested interests is even sillier. Without regulation, tobacco companies would probably be advertising to schoolchildren.

I do wish that Julian Cribb had mentioned population. As Norman Borlaug, the "Father of the Green Revolution", said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, advances in agriculture are ultimately futile if population continues to grow without limit. Dr. Cribb does talk about it, though, in his excellent book, "The Coming Famine".

We are all agreed then that governments are often inept - but the statists hold a flame for their old love.

According to this theory, people with a direct interest in eating, and others in making profit and avoiding loss, wouldn’t have the idea of doing what would be necessary to make their situation better but governments, without the incentives and with no better knowledge, can just magically fix any given problem we hand it.

Since government doesn’t have any resources of money or knowledge that are not available to the population as a whole, only force, the theory is that centrally directed *force* (“policy") can fix the problem. It’s nonsense.

We are able to directly judge the success or failure of private action because of the instruments of profit and loss. But with government, these do not apply. So how are its advocates judging the success or failure of governmental action? They simply *assume* that governmental action must be beneficial. So we get this open-ended unaccountable conjuring – which is only reviewed when the waste and disasters are so enormous they can’t be ignored.

The GFC proves the opposite of what the statists assume, because government at all relevant times claimed and exercised control of the supply and price of money– (money, as in, it’s a *financial* crisis). The statist theory is that government has the competence to, and should regulate the money supply so as to provide stability and ensure full employment. The libertarian theory is that this will cause massive economic upheaval and unemployment. So whose theory was proved correct? The statist response is to blame the market. But either way – whether the government does, or does not have the competence it claimed - the statist theory is proved wrong.

“Is the idea then, if markets are so good, to remove all government restraints […] and let the winner take all?”

Yes - let the people – not bureaucrats - decide, and thus direct the course of production to their most urgent and important wants.

Voluntary co-operation is mutually beneficial, not a zero-sum game like coercion.

Divergence, you point to the issue that total reliance on self interest inevitably constrains common interest. Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” (1968. "The Tragedy of the Commons". Science 162, 1243-1248) points to the impact even innocent actors have, and argues the limits to damage is government instrumentality. William Lloyd first argued such issues in “Two Lectures on the Checks to Population” (http://books.google.com/books?id=kQt9Kg-chXAC&ots=seD3WAKeH4&dq=Two%20Lectures%20on%20the%20Checks%20to%20Population&pg=PP3#v=onepage&q&f=false).

These people, and those following them, well recognised individuals left unconstrained will damage the collective interests leading to destruction. Hume has concurred with the notion “let the winner take all? Yes - let the people – not bureaucrats - decide, and thus direct the course of production to their most urgent and important wants…”

Can those arguing for removal of government instrumentality have the capacity to imagine the impact of the USA doing nothing following Lehman’s collapse and subsequent GFC? Or the impact on Europe of failing to commonly address the PIGS of Europe (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain) and their financial woes?

Hume’s statement above equates to the self serving stupidity within the finance sector and amongst property speculators that threatens to bring the entire economy undone. Ireland’s commercial property absurdities are an example. Perhaps the impacts of the ‘Great Depression’ or the outcomes of the property bust in the late 1800s have been forgotten?

2 Timothy records “People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God…”

That there needs to be a major rebuild of government bureaucracies is undeniable, they are populated by executives on short term contracts who survive on sycophancy to Ministers. But the need for government instrumentality in preventing damage to ‘the common’ remains essential. Don’t confuse governments’ setting boundaries on the sand pit we play in with how we play in the sand pit.