What a perverted marketplace looks like

Evan Smith writes at OL,

The next time you bite into a cheesy stuffed crust pizza at your local Dominos or Pizza Hut, you might want to thank the federal government.

For the past few decades, the feds have been keeping a literal mountain of cheese lying around for no ascertainable purpose. As of March 31, about 1.2 billion pounds of excess cheese had been accumulated in commercial cold-storage freezers across the United States — the largest such stockpile in history, according to the Washington Post. That’s 39 pounds of cheese for every man, woman and child in the country — so much cheese, in fact, that the government has been encouraging fast food chains to create new cheesy-centric products just to get rid of some of it.

...the small, local farmers, or 80 percent, receive a combined 9 percent of all farm subsidy funds, making our current system nothing more than a form of crony capitalism writ large across our amber waves of grain.

...Perhaps nothing exemplifies the foolishness of our subsidy system than does the “herd retirement program,” which has been part of dairy farming across America for almost 40 years, according to Bloomberg. Because subsidies boost the production of milk in the United States, farmers will try anything to keep prices up. That includes killing their own cows to limit the supply of milk and cheese. Yes, that’s right: our subsidy system, originally meant to assure we have adequate milk and cheese production levels, now results in the wasteful killing of perfectly good cows.

That’s what a perverted marketplace looks like.

Read more here.