How often do "not free" markets have famines?
In the US, poor people are fat. They don't lack food. (They don't lack TVs, cars, or houses either.)
Not particularly well. We'll have to reduce our exports and draw down some of our reserves.
In other words, our poor people can continue to be fat, not starving. They might buy fewer TVs for a while or reduce the amount of processed calories to handle the extra cost.
We can have several years of bad crops before we'll have a food shortage.
Of course, it would help if we stopped using food for automobile fuel. (The brazilians would love to sell us methanol for less but they don't have an early presidential primary.)
It is to the people starving.
> The issue at hand is when there's enough food that isn't well distributed, which is a completely different phenomenon.
As I pointed out, US poor people are fat. Why don't we have distribution problem?
No. Famine means a widespread lack of food. The problem for the people starving isn't famine, because if it was, there would be a lot more people starving. The problem is that they lack food. "Famine" is not a synonym for that.
Why doesn't the US have a distribution problem? Two reasons: 1) we produce so much that it covers up a lot of inefficiencies in the system and 2) widely available government assistance. Despite this, people do still go hungry here.
Where else are the poor as well off? (Inequality does not make someone less well off. Well off is what you have, regardless of what someone else has.)
It's the (mostly) free market that is producing that food at low cost and in such large amounts.
As I asked at the beginning, where do you have both free markets and starving people? I ask because it's easy to find places with starving people, yet they're not uniformly distributed.
And, how many places with not free markets manage to not have starving people and/or the occasional famine?
"Most people" simply isn't good enough.
Free markets generally work great for items that are not necessities. Efficiency, variety, and innovation is incentivized. But you always end up with some people who can't afford the items. If they're not a necessity, that's perfectly fine. But food is a necessity, and always having some people who can't afford food is not acceptable.