[serious] Charity thread

[Drake Tungsten]

Distance is not always the decisive factor

Which is why the fetish for local food is stupid. Jesus Christ...

[KrazyHorse]

The metaidiocy is thinking that individual consumers or even professional organizations will be able to aggregate reasonably accurate estimates of ecological impacts of all products without price discovery.

[Traianvs]

Right

[Drake Tungsten]

Your job is a noble one, KH.

[Traianvs]

Besides the fact he's completely missing the point, but whatever.

[KrazyHorse]

What is your point, then?

[Drake Tungsten]

Threads like this are a great example of why I hate stupid liberals more than stupid conservatives. Dumb ****ing rednecks are at least self-aware enough to usually admit that they might not be well-informed on an issue, when pressed. Dumb ****ing hipsters, on the other hand, think their joke college degrees magically turn their own prejudices into facts that are beyond reproach.

[KrazyHorse]

As I suspected, Traianus disappeared without revealing precisely what his point was.

[Traianvs]

My point is that locally grown food has a lot of advantages in terms of price, taste, and and a local economically sustainable farming system (and I'm not talking about the huge agro-industry here).

That doesn't mean that automatically every locally grown product will be more sustainable. Of course growing certain fruits in greenhouses here in Belgium would be stupid from a sustainable point of view for example. Nobody disputes that, it's only logical. But the points raised in the articles he mentioned didn't really argue against the concept of local food. They just nuanced it, as should be done with every topic.

It's just stupid to discount the concept of local food per se.

In any case, enough of the trolls now

[Traianvs]

As I suspected, Traianus disappeared without revealing precisely what his point was.

You have yet to bring a concrete argument against fair trade.

[Kuciwalker]

My point is that locally grown food has a lot of advantages in terms of price, taste

Consumers don't need to know where the food is grown in order to make decisions based on these.

and and a local economically sustainable farming system

This is the only information consumers don't necessarily have, and it is easy to give it to them via price with Pigouvian taxes/tariffs on unsustainable practices.

[Traianvs]

[QUOTE=Kuciwalker;5781731]

This is the only information consumers don't necessarily have, and it is easy to give it to them via price with Pigouvian taxes/tariffs on unsustainable practices.

You really want it spelled out that taxing (most of) the negative externalities is just about impossible in today's world, do you?

[KrazyHorse]

My point is that locally grown food has a lot of advantages in terms of price, taste, and and a local economically sustainable farming system (and I'm not talking about the huge agro-industry here).

The first two points are matters of personal preference. If you find that local food in your area is superior on the basis of cost and quality then congrats.

As for the third, I have no idea what you mean by local economically sustainable and, I suspect, neither do you.

I suggest you come back when you're ready to think about this like an adult.

[KrazyHorse]

You have yet to bring a concrete argument against fair trade.

Fair trade creates incentives for rent-seeking by 3rd world producers. If there are no barriers to entry then the rent-seeking will dissipate all rents. Meanwhile, by increasing the price consumers in the first world pay, it will reduce the amount of trade. Fair trade makes both domestic consumers and foreign producers less well off. Domestic producers gain, but by less than domestic consumers lose.

[Kuciwalker]

[QUOTE=Traianvs;5781735]

You really want it spelled out that taxing (most of) the negative externalities is just about impossible in today's world, do you?

The other point I forgot to make is that you haven't given any evidence that locally grown food is more likely to be economically sustainable.