#1 - None of this affects how funny the gag was.Duskofdead wrote:This is a very narrow launch point from which to discuss farm subsidies. The U.S. is committed to a "cheap food" policy and you don't want to see how much worse it would be if agriculture was a pure private industry and had to be perfectly legit in every way. $18 milk, anyone? $60 for a watermelon? Look at Japan if you want an idea of what an American food market without subsidies would look like, and if we actually succeeded in getting rid of all illegal immigrant labor. Expect prices to shoot much higher than any estimate on what biofuel would do (somehow, btw, biofuel has mysteriously failed to bring about the end of the world scenario in Brazil that Teaos insists on) if we abandoned a cheap food policy and farmers who couldn't sell their goods on going market prices at a profit would just stop farming and pursue some other employment.
Yes, as with any system, there are abuses and areas where tweaks could be used. However as with most discussions criticizing public systems people focus more on the silly or frivolous instances and ignore the larger picture of what that system does, or brings int erms of benefits to our society, because you take them for granted.
#2 - I think you underestimate the power of a free market to curtail its own pricing. Japan isn't a perfect example, because of the lack of arable land.
#3 - I don't think I ever advocated here a completely laissez-faire approach.
#4 - I don't recall Teaos predicting that biofuel would be the end of the world; my own point - as someone who has been in the industry and seen things from the manufacturer's side as well as the end user's - is that both bio-diesel and E85 have been nowhere near as advertised. Bio-diesel is a mess, because it's expensive and new federal regs from 2007 onward require redundant self-cleaning exhaust-driven particulate filters among other changes to produce a much "cleaner" vehicle. On a comparatively small commercial chassis - say, a typical landscaper's dump truck, only two axles and a 10' - 12' dump, maybe only 25,950-lb. GVWR, the engine ALONE thanks to these new regs costs $10,000 - $12,000. Bio-diesel degrades these new cleaner and VERY expensive engines. Plus, with the advent of low-sulfur diesel being required by law, there is no terribly big "green" advantage to using it. E85 is similar - while the fuel doesn't degrade the vehicle, it doesn't produce any real benefit - either for the environment or the consumer - and 85%-ethanol fuel simply can't be found in many parts of the country.
You want to talk about energy policy in general? Tell the Sierra Club lobbyists to stop pretending to be environmentalist, and let things like Yucca Mountain open. Even with containment/storage issues - which are feared more than they are actual - nuclear has to be one of the primary ways to go. Fund things like the small-pellet reactor and the high-speed reactor - both of which COULD be realities within 30 years - and you now have both a reactor small and safe enough to put anywhere on the grid; then you have a large-scale reactor which actually uses the heavy strontium and other "bad" by-products of the other reactors to fuel itself!
