I think it's the other way around - without the government stabilizing the market with subsidies, dairy would be dirt cheap, then expensive, then cheap, then totally unavailable, etc.

Edit/correction: actually, the USDA doesn't operate price floors anymore. "Eventually, the USDA decided it had had enough, ending the price support program in 2014."[1]

[1] https://modernfarmer.com/2022/05/cheese-caves-missouri/

The market has already come up with a solution for this--futures.

The contract size for milk future is 200K pounds, a little over 23K gallons, or about 500 years of my family's consumption. It seems like policies intended to stabilize the supply and price of milk are working better than futures for my use case.

It's like you never heard of wholesalers vs. retailers.

You're acting like your family has to buy milk by the tankerful or flour by the palletful.

More examples from daily life: The electricity market, board lots vs. odd lots in stock trading, fractional shares, restaurant supply stores.

In Canada dairy farms throw out their over supply. There are quotas and they cannot exceed them.

If that's not price fixing the other way, I don't know what it is.

Like the comment next to mine says, it is likely to ensure stability.

Average person would on average pay the same, less taxes for subsidies and more in the store.

The problem is with smaller countries, where your local milk will be more expensive (and you less taxed) but your neigbor countries' subsidized milk will still be cheaper, and you'd buy that and in the process, destroy your local milk industry.