This was the reason for the Irish potato famine. They were growing wheat but we’re forced to sell it or they would lose their farms to landlords.
There was plenty of food. It was largely requisitioned by the British military.
The peasants were allowed to grow some food for their own survival: which mostly were potatoes. When the blight swept the island, the plentiful edible food was still taken, and the farmers were left with nothing. The ones that tried to keep any bread, milk or butter lost their farms, if not their lives.
It is why it is called the Great Hunger.
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” ― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
I seem to recall food stores paying armed security to guard their trash. They spent money guarding trash with guns rather than letting someone survive that capitalism has deemed “unworthy”
Weird that we’re letting sociopaths run things and not barring them from positions of power. Why are we letting it be an argument that there should be a higher basic standard of living? Can’t give food cause there’s no profit in it, abundance in homelessness but companies buying up houses is okay, second and third rate medical care cause it’s cheaper for the insurance companies.
To a capitalist, a forest has no value until it’s cut down.
To prevent starving, establish UBI.
I believe UBI will never come to pass because the rich have too much to lose. Imagine a workforce not beholden to the capitalists?
“The rich” have names and addresses.
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I would love to see regulations define “fair profit.”
Material costs + labor costs + fair profit = retail price.
Fair profit cannot be more than X% of retail price.
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In the medical device and pharmaceutical industries, this more or less already exists in countries with socialized medicine. It’s not as explicit as my formula, but the price of medications and devices are regulated. Industry needs to demonstrate the actual benefit of a new product over a prior product for the system to pay for it, and the price of the product is then set on the basis of the health economic value it brings.
Some say it stifles innovation, but honestly, it eliminates the bullshit minor changes that are only made to continue justifying high prices and exclusivity.
Anyway, I think the “Exodus of industry” argument is an empty threat the shareholder class makes when they feel threatened. A market is a market, and if they want to continue to sell in it, they have to follow the rules, even when they change.
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It’s always externalized exploitation because they’re all multinational corporations.
It’s true that many of the big players are based in the US, e.g. Pfizer, J&J, Merck, AbbVie, Abbott, EliLily, etc.
But there are plenty that aren’t:
- Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, BioNTech, and Merck Group (MilliporeSigma in the US, distinct from Merck & Co) are headquartered in Germany.
- AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline are in the UK.
- Roche and Novartis are in Switzerland.
- Novo Nordisk in Denmark.
- Sanofi in France.
- Takeda, Otsuka, and Astellas in Japan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_biomedical_companies_by_revenue
It’s important to note that much of the R&D pharma relies on is publicly funded via academic grants in research carried out at universities. It’s not to say that pharma doesn’t also carry out clinical research, which of course does carry a cost, but a lot of the development dollars for a given drug are spent well before they make it into pharma’s hands.
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You need competition. The milk surplus, you want that. Companies should compete and only demand what they need to keep going.
But if you do that, there is no real owning class. So you need other ways to finance innovation.
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