this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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I think about my employer, which is one of the largest in my area. No shareholders. It's a healthcare non-profit.
The services they provide still cost money, because they have to pay employees, vendors, rent, etc. However, the only profit motive is to ensure that they have sufficient income continue to provide healthcare to the community and grow too support more patients.
I guess Habitat for Humanity would count as non-profit home construction. Are there non-profit farms?
Could be worse... It could be that people are starving because it's politically convenient for them to starve. Back in 1959 China introduced the Four Pests campaign, which involved exterminating rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows because they kept eating crops.
...Turns out that was a bad idea, and those 'pests' were actually pretty important to ecological balance, leading to (in combination with other Maoist policies where central government was telling farmers how to farm, but also lacked the knowledge on how to farm correctly) the Great Chinese Famine, killing anywhere between 15-55 million people by starvation.
Not defending China, but I wouldn't say that had anything to do with political convenience... the Irish potato famine, or the way world governments are currently letting Israel starve Gaza, are examples of mass starvation caused by political convenience... but Mao's thing was due to criminal ignorance and stupidity, not political convenience.
...No, it was political convenience, both in the Chinese Famine and the Irish Potato Famine. The British were so convinced that laissez faire capitalism would resolve the issue that they actively got in the way when that turned out not to be true, because it was better to them that the system be seen as working than it actually working. The same applied to the Chinese when Mao was warned that exterminating the sparrows would cause famine, as would 'deep plowing' made up by some Soviet guy, but The Party can never be wrong, and if The Party tells you how to do something, you do it that way, even if millions of people die.
It was a situation in both cases where political ideology was put up against reality, and political ideology won, resulting in mass starvation.
When it comes to Israel... I don't think it really compares because Israel knows Gazans are starving, and that's actually the goal. They actively want the Palestinians to be gone as quickly as possible. The political convenience is more on the side of anyone who allies with Israel because it's more convenient for them to have an ally in the middle east, rather than step in and deal with the problem. I guess it would be convenient for Netanyahu specifically, because so long as he keeps the war going, he's staying in power and most importantly out of prison.
Yeah I know right, same as this period in the US called the 'Dust Bowl' where they fucked up the local environment so much it ruined the topsoil and lead to clouds of dust choking the lands because they had terrible agricultural, environmental, and land management practices.
Or the Soviets trying to be different for the sake of being different and choosing Lysenkoism over genetics.
Yup, they all suck.
That really just sounds like the market forces of supply and demand.
I mean, profit is still a primary factor of being in the agriculture business, sure. But if a company isn't profitable, they stop being a company.
If there's a surplus of food, and a finite amount of time for it to be consumed, it's going to be sold at a loss or it's going to rot.
While Bobby's thought makes perfect sense, it's more of a cycle and not (just) necessarily an intrinsic flaw of capitalism.
The intrinsic flaw of capitalism is when the supply-side realizes that the value of goods is "whatever they'll pay", and end up mini-maxing profit...reducing costs by limiting yield, then jacking up the price because of reduced supply. Maximum profit for minimum work.
Applying that to industries that are pretty much essential for life (implying a pretty static level of demand)...agriculture, healthcare, etc...when not all people have the same amount of money, is truly evil.
Brace yourselves, because that could easily be a result of the impending agriculture consolidation that'll come after Trump finishes destroying all the remaining smaller farms. Easier to collude when there's a small number of giant conglomerate farms.
Edit: okay I realized I wrote all of that to essentially describe artificial scarcity. But the last paragraph (before this) is pretty important.
You're making a good argument that we should partially socialize the systems needed to support life, like agriculture, and healthcare, but I would go further and include housing and a few other things.
At that point, we are talking about a strong welfare state.
So the modern solution to all this was invented like, 90 years ago by FDR.
We need another FDR.
They don't typically sell at a loss, because that drives prices down. They dump it. Canada throws something like 40%+ produce in the landfill. Some stores even have a mandate that surplus food can't be donated or taken home by staff, it has to dumpstered.
As a side note the big chain here added RFID type rink price labels. They can changes prices on a whim. Government hasn't approved the surge pricing model the grocers are asking for, however they list some items at an over inflated price, then almost every day it is on sale at a different price (which amounts to surge pricing). I.e. Our coffee creamer can be as low as $3.50 or as high as $9.00. Its not related to best before date, because its a soy based creamer that has 3 months BB date.
I think the intrinsic flaw of capitalism is that it is a social power hierarchy. All power hierarchies invite abuse, such as producers extracting maximum profit on essential goods. Capitalism is particularly virulent and unstable compared to better-known historical power hierarchies for several reasons particular to it's own scheme, but it's core flaw is the same.
The thing with scarcity is that it follows the Jevons paradox, so technically, scarcity is basically a horizon - it is there but you can't reach it / overcome it per se.
The thing is, as demand rises for the commodity in question, so does standard of living. Yes, with tap-water we use more water, but we're cleaner, warmer, and drink adequate amounts of water.
If we found more efficient ways to make corn, for example, we could (and sometimes do) use it as a fuel for heating and energy production.
There will always be scarcity of something but eventually it'll be things most people could happily do without because they have all the non-scarce stuff.
That's how it works in theory. Alas, the reality is too much in the hubris.
I see how this meme is clearly targeting capitalism and not farmers, and I understand and agree with the point that money is the primary incentive for growing food under capitalism.
But in my opinion the part about letting people starve in order to manufacture scarcity misses the mark. As far as I can tell, the primary reason that so much food goes to waste is liability. No one wants to sell food that could reasonably be constrained as having caused an illness for fear of a lawsuit - if not for that fact, much more food "waste" would actually go to use. Even in the hypothetical absence of liability no overall food scarcity needs to be manufactured because there remains a scarcity of "premium" food.
Your point is arguably valid for the industrialized countries, but untrue for the preindustrial ones where hunger still takes place. We could industrialize them, but it's not profitable, so we don't.
I would say that food scarcity in preindustrial countries is not "manufactured" per se, because there isn't an excess of food lying around in those places. You are right that people there starve in part because it isn't profitable to get food to them, but there are other reasons too such as lack of adequate infrastructure to store and transport food and perhaps even lack of trained personnel to distribute it etc.
So really I think for preindustrial countries it's a complex picture that basically boils down to the oppositional philosophy generally held when considering international relations. So in a situation like that I think it isn't accurate to say that scarcity was manufactured in order to justify the existence of capitalism.
Also your statement that it isn't profitable to industrialize other nations and so we don't seems contrary to what I understand, which is that it is often profitable and that is why developed nations are often trying to invest in industrialization efforts (of course taking their unfair piece of the action in doing so). I feel that this principal of investing in industrialization has largely guided the international efforts of China, the USA, and others.
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