Increasing food prices cause more food to be grown and food to be shipped over longer distances, lessening the impact of a famine. It also causes people to spend less on luxury foods that cost more per calorie.

> We have more empty houses than homeless people. Efficient market my ass.

Have you bought an unused home and given it to someone homeless lately? There are many that are quite inexpensive out there.

On the whole, I agree that our current housing and property market is not as efficient as it could be. One reason for this are our building codes; they raise the cost of housing making truly inexpensive homes illegal. There is definitely a lot of benefits to living in a properly–built house, but that is always going to be more expensive than a shack you built yourself on land you claimed from the wilderness at the edge of a growing population. When governments eliminate that possibility, they cause people to go homeless. I suspect that you will want to “fix” this by having the government step in and buy a house for everyone who wants one.

The bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.