thanks for your rambling stream of consciousness :-)

there is one key detail in what you say: How do we ensure people don't starve because they can't afford food?

That's a lovely slippery road, because in the same vein you can ask: How do we ensure people don't die just because they can't afford healthcare? or elderly care?

And once we admit ourselfes to that humanist thinking, we may end up wondering how we balance the strive for profit, the force which we have agreed so miraculously "drives innovation", how we balance that with the wealth imbalance it creates. Because of course you maximize profit not just by increasing market value and being better than competition, but also by driving down cost, cost of supplies (there we are with food), cost of labor, tax, any expenses.

The strive for profit was formerly known under the ugly and negatively connotated name of greed. How do we tame and counterbalance greed?

And how to we create and adjust these countermeasures, the checks and balances of wealth distribution, such that every human being, by the grace of being human, has a right to die of age, and not of lack of food, or lacking shelter, or lacking healthcare, or lacking elderly care?

Have we even started thinking about it this way? Have started thinkubg about wealth accumulation and wealth responsibility as a generational and societal contract?

"We, the people, give everybody the freedom and the right to accumulate wealth. Should you become insanely successful with it, then it becomes your job to contribute back to those much less fortunate. and no: just redistributing from the center field to the bottom is not what we do here. We definitively make you, the wealthy, take responsibility for the poor, the sick and the old."

I think such a cleanly spelled out foundation would be helpful, so "the wealthy" and "the middle class" have a shared understanding of responsibility towards "the poor, the old, the sick".

And then we can have much more meaningful conversations about making wealth trickle down, to "the poor, the old, the sick."

We can then decide if we should just provide cash to those "in need", and have it trickle back up? Or do we install better educated agencies, who create and establish frameworks, and subsidize inidrectly, invisibly. like subsidizing agriculture, so food is cheaper in shops? direct funding of health care? elderly care? housing? or a mix? a "slider" which complements what you have as earnings with subsidies for rent, health care, ...?

How do we balance taxation and philantropy?

How do we, the people, raise the funding for this, "fairly and justly"?

The foundation for this really is this is a "contract" of clear responsibility of wealth for the people, who have allowed for and enabled that wealth.

And what I'm missing is a clear and transparent conversation of how wealth "trickles up" and then is redistributed back down. and how much trickling up do we enable? with "intellectual property" law? for plants and plant treatment?

The subsidies you pointed at so elaborately with your links are invisible to "the people" and intransparent even to those directly working with them. The funding for subsidies is currently collected mostly from the middle class, as taxes, and then it rushes through the hands of farmers or other subsidized entities right into the pockets of "intellectual property" owners for agri tech, pharmaceutics, arts, music. Where it disappears from the system, if wealth is not taxed, or otherwise redistributed back into the circle of life, so to speak.

In short: no matter if yo do it via indirect, hidden subsidies into farming, healthcare, elderly care, housing, eductaion (we didn't look at that yet :-D ) or direct subsidies into the pockets of those who don't have a living salary, the key thing is an agreement on where the cash comes from, that you redistribute back to where it's needed, the societal contract, the give to get for trickle up and support back down. and I'd love to understand where that conversation is happening.