by mrguyorama | 2025-10-30 20:32:36+00:00
>We probably shouldn’t have the government lobster truck that comes by and gives everybody a fresh lobster

Here in Maine, fresh lobster has frequently in a retail store been cheaper than ground beef per pound. Sometimes by as much as half the price. Our industry was catching far too much, and had frequent price problems until we started selling it to China.

You can buy lobster on EBT. Remember that a significant portion of the goal of Food Stamps is to be a subsidy to food producers. Maine's lobster industry benefits from that subsidy.

In a similar way, Susan Collins once made the US federal government buy tons of Maine blueberries for school lunch programs to improve pricing during a high yield year.

Lobster is a rare luxury in Colorado for sure, but in some coastal states it is downright abundant. If you live near a fishing community, lobster is like $2 per giant bucket, not pound. Its luxury is mostly artificial and marketing.

Food deserts are a huge problem, but they are not caused by Food Stamps. Food deserts are caused by the same thing as nearly every bad thing that affects poor people in the USA: that we allowed businesses to M&A themselves into massive conglomerates that get more rights than god and more influence and power than most countries.

Places that used to have local grocers or IGAs lost them because the wealthier members of the poor community could drive an hour away to the Walmart. The IGA didn't lose all its business, but enough to make it nonviable.

Oh that's just free market competition! Walmart was able to lower prices and collect more business by being efficient!

Are we actually better off driving an hour away to grocery shop at Walmart? Doesn't matter, Americans lost so much purchasing power that they almost didn't have a choice. Nearly all extra dollars our economy has generated since 1970ish have gone to a tiny group of connected people. Nobody could afford the local IGA anymore, because America stopped letting normal people make money. Whats worse, there are now companies like Dollar General and their entire business strategy is dropping into those communities that no longer have a local grocery store and extracting what little remaining wealth that community has to some corporate headquarters and CEO that lives 2000 miles away.

It's impossible for rural towns and small communities to exist when every dollar they spend goes out of that economy. You need to provide room in the economy for small players who don't have such """efficient""" operations because they hire locally, buy locally, work locally, etc. But it doesn't matter that they are "less efficient" because that money will cycle through that local economy and enable multiple people to actually live.

None of this is new. America has had successful businesses try to own the entire market its whole existence. Each and every time we had to break them up, and we eventually decided to police the process of Mergers entirely to just stop the problem before it hurt people. But then Reagan insisted we should just.... not do that?

So of course, now we have the expected problem and a stupidly inefficient market. Letting a company like Google or Facebook buy everyone and anyone who might choose to compete with them later is a market failure.