I guess he's saying that for food to be this cheap seen with our eyes, there needs to be a substantial oversupply. And since there are physical limitations to how much food we are able to actually eat, if there's an oversupply a bunch of it will be thrown away, whether by farmers, distributors or consumers:
Either they fail to sell the food, or the low prices gets consumers to buy more than they need.
I never said anything about percent of food, my comment was based on type of food. We have huge subsidies for some types of food. That does not mean ex: pot growers get a large subsidy. It's really a fairly narrow group of foods which get the vast majority of subsidies and are then produced in truly mind boggling quantities.
There was a great corn documentary a while ago where a small processor kept making larger larger grain silo's for a while as productivity increased. Until, they simply gave up they now just have a huge pile with a tarp over it. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1112115/
Which is why corn sirup is in just about everything. Also, avacadoes for example had an indirect subsidy in the name of avoiding pests in imported Mexican avacadoes. Still, the unequal subsides on various food products causes all sorts of problems as substitutions are generally of a lower quality in some way. Arguably much if the obesity epidemic directly relates to subsidizing calorie dense foods instead of fruits and vegetables.
Does any other jurisdiction ban one's company from leaving? None that I'm aware of.
Just losing that future option value is sufficient to deem such a move insane regardless of original jurisdiction - unless for some reason there is zero other option.
For instance, you ought to visit some rural areas sometime and see the "consequence-free environment" in which white women there live.
If you want to talk about middle-to-upper-middle-class white women in urban and suburban areas that is a different story, though "consequence-free environment" is still a bit of a stretch.
My first reaction was that it reads to be about American culture (and wonder if 'schrodinger' is Swedish, racism accusations are used as often as "hej" these days).
My second reaction is trying to replace 'white' with 'black'. Also, considering the heterogeneity of different parts of USA...
It sounded like culture to me too, until I replaced the word "white" with "black" in my head.
If I should say anything more: There is a limit of different standards for different groups (somewhere between a factor two and five), when it becomes disgusting hypocrisy.
The root of the problem is the question of whether social values should have weight in a situation of limited supply, ie. when taken to its extreme: should one person be allowed to fuck up the whole planet because they have more monopoly money, thereby destroying the whole species and all future generations.
Conventional capitalists will say yes without thinking, then spout whatever view-confirming stuff they can find (like this URL). Market-libertarians say a market will evolve to cater for the resource impacted that all people value, though we haven't actually seen that happen yet (observe the failure of the carbon credit scheme). Socialists say yes, we should treat one another with respect because fundamentally we're all in this together.
The root of the problem is that humans have evolved anti-market biases that served us well when living in tribal communes but which are Pareto inefficient when living in large billion person societies.
I'd call that a capitalist view. In all its brevity, it exhibits one of the absolute top fallacies of capitalist thinking when in "have evolved anti-market biases" you allude to markets being some kind of 'natural' state of affairs. This falsity was neatly summed up by George Soros: Classical economics is based on a false analogy with Newtonian physics... by which he means, if you listen to or read any of his numerous interviews, that there is no 'equilibrium' and self-regulating nature of the market is fundamentally more a well-spun, oft-repeated tale than a self-evident truth. Further smackdown can be applied through reading Debt: The First 5000 Years (which conventional capitalist economists positively hate).
Leaving that aside, you'll note that I alluded to the ugly truth (the world is inherently limited; ie. there's sure to be critical resource shortages given current trajectories). From my perspective, any so-called anti-market bias will evolve right about the time we see mass starvations due to stupid short-sighted environmental management, potable water shortages, etc. - ie. if you think we've got anti-market bias now ... my wager is that you'll be shocked at how hollow the notion becomes in the relatively near future.
But the view does have some credence, ie. some forms of decision-making don't scale. But the obvious answer to that, far from assuming a self-evident path of decoupling historically present social, environmental, cultural and other local factors from economic decision-making across an inherently globalized god-like market that will deliver us from all ills as you imply (clearly, it won't), is perhaps to evolve newer and more subtle modes of collective decision-making that include market-like consideration of these factors and scale more effectively. That would be more like the market-libertarian view.
Wut