"The thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of a man who succumbs to infection with a penicillin-resistant organism."

- Sir Alexander Fleming

It should be noted that Fleming discovered Pencillin and the statement is especially prescient coming from him. He spoke countless times around the world trying to raise awareness that antibiotic resistance would be inevitable when used improperly.

The nightmare scenario is medical science gets rolled back by a century as non-trivial infections return to being a death sentence.

OK and how do you locate and invoice all of these morally responsible individuals who have led to this resistance? It's hundreds of thousands of doctors. I doubt their malpractice insurance will cover this. And then aside from the unnecessary prescriptions, because the ignorant patient-consumer demanded it, is the ignorant patient-consumer who doesn't take the entire prescribed dosage which is itself the far bigger problem that lead to resistance. How are they punished and insured for their immorality?

I think you've mistaken moral for legal. We don't punish immorality except through social and cultural pressure, or to make it a legal issue, and then we aren't punishing morality so much as legality (even if rooted in morality).

>Farmers are few, people who get diseases are many. Shouldn't be too hard.

"Concentrated benefits, dispersed costs." Farmers are highly organized and vigilant in defense of their subsidies and regulations, whereas sick people are not similarly organized and the policy connection to their condition isn't obvious. Concentrated benefits are what create special interests, which by their nature put their own interest ahead of the national interest.

Agro lobby is pretty powerful in the US. The people lobby - our dear senate, republican and democrat simply sells out.

Why does it seem like every damn thing we do for farmers is awful for others?

I know it's not, we reap the benefits in lower food prices, but does beef really need to be cheap enough we can eat it 7 days a week?

>I know it's not, we reap the benefits in lower food prices, but does beef really need to be cheap enough we can eat it 7 days a week?

No it is. The total cost to society has to include healthcare costs as well. Saying, 'This lowers our cost at the dinner table' is only looking at part of the equation.

Never mind that people don't eat dinner together which is a by product of having super cheap convenient packaged calories available. Eating as a family increases child development significantly, it's like the cheapest thing you can do to give kids a good start.

Never mind that we don't really need nearly as much corn as we produce. When the farm bill came out and started picking agricultural winners, we turned garbage farm land into prime producers of a crop that we don't need. Then we added tariffs to sugar imports, then we put corn into everything, providing a cheap source of calories and diabetes, heart disease, perhaps cancer (most of the links here are still from correlation and haven't been proven as causation). Corn moved from a side dish to being in everything you eat unless you are cooking all (most) of your own food.

We have the (possible) super bug issue from our meat sources.

It takes like 50 gallons of water to grow an avocado but we do that anyways because irrigation water is subsidized in many states even as we start to drain our reservoirs.

It takes 2 calories of fossil fuel to make one calorie of food. We do this because it's still cost effective because of subsidies.

The whole picture makes it look not quite as cheap, we've just pushed the cost into other categories to hide it.

> It takes 2 calories of fossil fuel to make one calorie of food. We do this because it's still cost effective because of subsidies.

I think "we do this because we can't eat fossil fuels no matter how many calories they provide, so trading total energy content for ability to serve as food is valuable, independent of subsidy" would be more accurate.

Partly, but we can grow food in a more efficient way. It's currently cost prohibitive because we use feed lots, and subsidies water and fuel for farming.

What about photosynthesis?