Motto: I should perhaps write to explain the entire US corn situation, seeing how I'm probably the only one that both understands it and isn't sworn to secrecy.
In order to make sense of what will be going on in this article we need to start with matters discussed in the older Of skimmed milk and skimming the milk article. In relevant part :
The theory behind it is this : without dumping, economy is a competition on operational costs. Whoever can make the product cheaper wins the market. With dumping, economy moves from an operational competition to a financial competition : whoever has the largest bank account or the best credit can sell his product for 0 for longer, thus driving everyone out of business, thus acquiring a monopoly, thus then being able to sell the item for infinity. It can be said, and I happen to think that the point of economy is to close the zero-infinity price window on everything as soon as possible. In this perspective, dumping is an antieconomic activity.
The fact of the matter is that people will compete, because that's what people do. The other fact of the matter is that if you can, you musti, and consequently people will compete in all the ways, be they globally productive or globally destructive. For this reason the competition as to "who has the deeper pockets" is never ever ever off the table. You see it poke its head at the margins. All the margins. What is patent litigation, or corporation litigation generally ? What is lobbying ? Etcetera.
Now it comes to pass that one of the needs all living creatures share is the need for food. This need will therefore be supplied.
Now it further comes to pass that there exist precisely two methods to supply this need of all living creatures : agriculture and synthesis. That's it.
Now it even further comes to pass that both farming and chemistry are large industrial fields, with their own real estate, machinery, with their own banks, with their own senators and so on and so forth. The problem however is that while chemistry has more money, agriculture has better looks.
That's all this is : we gotta pick a girl to marry, and we have to somehow decide which one shall it be. The rich ugly chick or the pretty poor chick ? So go ahead and pick!
Knowing what a sort of prick you are, I know exactly what you've picked : you've picked to marry the rich ugly chick and fuck the poor pretty one on the side. Congratulations. That's what we're doing too, exactly. Chemistry is the wife, but agriculture is kept quietly to the side, because those apples on her... oh mamita.
This basically means two things : on one hand that we'll constantly be transferring resources in a purely antieconomical fashion towards agriculture - such as for instance the retarded "feeding the world" programme, which as pretty much everyone with half a clue has figured by now only exists to give money to the farmer lobby. Such as for instance the direct purchases for "national security" and other nonsensical stockpiling, which transfers billions a year to the farmer lobby. Such as the recent fuel nonsense, which consists of trying to embed the farming process into fuel consumption at great cost and with considerable difficulty. Why ? Because we don't want her to leave, that's why.
The same thing also means that the poor mistress will be subjected to a lot of humiliation and mischief from the part of the legitimate wife. It can't for instance grow chickens without using an arsenic based chicken "medicine", it can't grow cattle without a whole array of other "medicines" and so on. What is all this ? Why, simply the pharma industry, a chief scion and integral part of the chemistry lobby, skimming the mistress' milk. So, daddy government, you want to buy your secret mistress a lovely pearl necklace ? You'll have to buy your wife's daughter a nicer diamond one or else!
What can we possibly do ? It's not our fault the pretty girl is poor any more than it's our fault the correct move is to marry the rich one. Shall we do away with apples completely and permanently ? Maybe, for the lower classes, but the people who make decisions prefer the good stuff you know, and for that matter who's to know what the future brings ? Maybe old ugly croaks unexpectedly for some unimaginable reason. You never know.
That's the whole story : chemistry has more money, and so economically it would have extinguished agriculture by now. We don't want that to happen, but definitely can't afford to tell chemistry to pack it. So we're stuck in what people could describe as the best of all possible worlds : the splendor of choice, with all the cost and inconvenience maintaining that choice imposes.
At least we're getting great apple pie as often as we can get away.
———- A concept introduced here years ago in the excellent "Why I'm against legalisation of psychoactive substances" (Romanian article). Basically the argument is that hookers, who live in a system which has legalised drugs, will be forcibly hooked (usually on heroin or meth, less commonly on coke) as a matter of course. Whether they want to or not - the cheapest way to get a new whore as a pimp is and will remain kidnapping some comely schoolgirl and injecting her a few times.
McDonalds clerks and various "journalists" live in a roughly equivalent system which however has not (yet) legalised drugs. Consequently their employers work them through various other gimmicks (promotions!) rather than on the very direct and very effectual heroin paradigm. Should drugs be legalised, employers will have to, whether they want to or not, will have to move their livestock on heroin, or whatever alternative is cheaper.
This is the meaning of "if you can you must" : if amphetamine is legal to use for truckers then you as a trucker no longer have the option to not use it, as your boss does't care why you can't compete with the other truckers, and isn't interested that amphetamine usage reduces your usable life from decades to mere years. He can just "hire" new losers when the current set croaks. [↩]