John Carter

I disagree. "Cheap" does not equal "good" - and what we need from food is "good".
We'd be crowded out by GM crop imported from less strict countries in next to no time - the same market forces which allow you to buy a t-shirt at Tesco for £1.50 instead of £15 elsewhere would quickly kill our internal production.

If you're in any doubt, I invite you to go research what's happening to local food supplies in Argentina since they moved a lot of production over to GM crops (i.e. sacrificed good, clean food on the alter of the almighty dollar).

Remove the subsidies... Remove the imports of stuff we can grow ourselves... The internal market and production would right itself soon enough.

kernow

Remove the subsidies... Remove the imports of stuff we can grow ourselves... The internal market and production would right itself soon enough.[/quote]

This is basicly what I meant,

lkelly

I don't think it is sensible to lose our self-sufficiency, so I agree with the title of this thread.

I always buy British food, anyway, especially meat, because it is more humanely reared, and more humanely killed. If it costs a bit more, I am happy with that, because I love animals, and I don't like to think that I am responsible for their suffering.

Intbel

__________________
We are all free to choose - every step of the way - no exceptions.

gareth2

So do i, especially with ketchup

Jk, i do to.

Paul Birch

Yes, it does. That's basic economics; both "cheap" and "good" essentially mean "best value for money". People buy whatever gives them best value for money. Which implies a subjective, personal trade-off of quality against price. A free market widens their range of options and maximises the overall optimised value to them. It doesn't try to make 'one size fit all', for 'one man's meat is another man's poison'.

If individuals prefer GM crops - or for that matter the stuff that goes by the misleading name of "organic" - they should be at liberty to choose for themselves. Either can be produced by local food producers if there is a demand, so the comparative advantage of domestic production is little changed.

John Carter

No. Good means "good". It's usually the exact opposite of "cheap". Expensive stuff tends to be expensive for a reason.

Incorrect. If market forces dictate that most individuals prefer GM crops (which they will because they're cheaper due to production densities), this leaves the people who don't want it with no choice. GM is all-consuming due to cross-contamination - leading to a "one size fits all" scenario which you just stated wouldn't happen.

The general principles of the free market economy can't, and shouldn't, be applied to food.

Here's an example of the free market from another angle: I'm currently looking for a DECT phone with a built-in answerphone capable of more than two minutes of recording time per message. Four years ago, there were plenty available. Try finding one these days! The market (cheap people) dictated that more than two minutes answer time wasn't required, so they stopped making them with this facility. Thus, I no longer have the choice of being able to get what I want (or, in this case, need).

And of course, "value" means different things to different people. Your idea of value may be a set of guitar strings which costs £5 (static, in the moment "value"). My idea of value may be a set of guitar strings which costs £12 yet last four times as long (time-conscious "value"). Guess which ones you can't buy any more because market forces dictated that demand didn't meet minimum supply requirements (i.e. the level required for the company to pay overheads).

http://www.pmctelecom.co.uk/shopping...=65&txt_from=2

your just not looking in the right places John

there are plenty there with more than 2 mins and its a British site

John Carter

There's only one model (a Panasonic, IIRC) which offers more than that - it allows three minutes. But it's way too complicated for the person who needs to operate it (because it's menu driven and doesn't use discreet base unit buttons for its answerphone functions). And doesn't have FF/RWD function so you can't replay the last individual message without replaying the whole lot from start to finish.

Four years ago, most DECT answerphones had the facility to turn off the 2-minute message time limit and simply run until the caller's phone was hung up. Which is kind of the point of the illustration here - that market forces have dictated that a particular useful feature which some people want is no longer manufactured INTO phpbb_a product, rendering a lack of choice (not more choice, as Paul states).


(edit: really, SG, don't bother wasting your time trying to prove me wrong about the phones thing, unless you really do have nothing better to do - I've spent about a month downloading and reading PDF manuals for every phone available to check the specifications on them and their suitability for use with the person who's going to be using it. Call me weird but I always try to read the manual for everything I buy before I buy it - it tends to ensure that the product is the right one)

Paul Birch

Try to give a definition of what "cheap" and "good" actually mean in economic terms. The nearest you will be able to come to a logical distinction is in the use of comparatives at the margin. An item purchased from one supplier may be "cheaper" than an almost identical item from another; an item purchased from one supplier may be "better" (in the opinion of most prospective purchasers) than one at the same price from another. However, major variations of this nature cannot persist in a free market.

If you try to compare goods that differ in both dimensions - different in price and different in quality - there is no unambiguous way to label them as respectively "cheap" or "good". Are custard creams cheaper than chocolate biscuits? Are they better? Those questions are economically meaningless, unless they are taken to mean "do they offer me better value for money?".

Of course, it may be that one chocolate biscuit is cheaper than one custard cream, but since they are distinct economic goods that tells you little or nothing about whether either is "cheap". For one person chocolate biscuits may be "cheap", for another "expensive", while custard creams may be "expensive" for the first and "cheap" for the second; it all depends on how "good" each of them thinks each good is - on how much they like them.

Similarly, we may talk about "expensive" cars, meaning high-priced (but we can only do that by crudely lumping together as "cars" very different products that provide quite different sets of consumer satisfactions). Or we can talk about "expensive", meaning over-priced (meaning that we wouldn't buy them because they would offer us poor value for money). The idea that we can compare the quality of different goods independently of the prices people are prepared to pay for them is a common fallacy - a typical plaint of communists, communitarians and anti-business socialists. Ultimately, how good a thing is means neither more nor less than how much human satisfaction it will provide.

First, market forces do not dictate what individuals prefer; it is the preferences of individuals that create the market forces. Second, the notion that if GM crops are grown only GM crops can be grown is complete nonsense. One might as well claim that "organic" crops cannot be grown and sold today because there is always "cross-contamination" from chemically fertilised fields. Or that "organic" crops shouldn't be grown because their pests and diseases contaminate neighbouring farms. However, one can grow crops with any degree of isolation one is prepared to pay for, and on as large or small a scale as one wishes. In a free market every producer is liable for losses he inflicts on other producers by contaminating, polluting or otherwise causing tort damage to their property.

If controlling contamination should prove particularly expensive for GM producers (I doubt if it would, but assume it for the sake of argument) then the consequent higher prices would mean less market demand for GM crops. Exactly the same is true for "organic" crops, or any other farming techniques. One might expect some tendency for different parts of the country to specialise in different varieties and production methods, in order to minimise the costs of cross-contamination; however, even a small country is amply large enough to gain the net benefits of domestic production across a very broad range of foodstuffs.

Furthermore, it would be of little consequence if - for reasons of economies of scale - the market led to a restricted variety of foods being grown domestically. An ample quantity of food - especially of staples - to eliminate the danger of starvation in war would still be produced. Foreign trade could then provide for all the extra variety one might wish.

They can and should.

The phone market is not even remotely a free market. However, if you really want a phone to those specifications, you can always get one custom made. It will cost you a lot more, that's all. No economic system whatsoever can guarantee to give everyone everything they'd like at the prices they are willing to pay. There is no such thing as demand separated from price. Economic demand means the number of units of a particular good that will be sold if offered at a particular price.