But that's not caused by SCARCITY. Scarcity means there isn't enough food. That's not the problem we have. There is enough food to feed everyone. It's just owned by the wrong people.
Scarcity in economics doesn't mean "not enough" right now, it means that if it were free there wouldn't be enough. If food were free, production would drop sharply and most of would starve.
> If food were free, production would drop sharply and most of would starve.
I don't understand why, free food doesn't mean that farmers would work for free.
Not going to the extreme failure that was the Soviet collectivization, governments could use part of their tax revenue and pay salary and/or for the harvest to the farmers and redistribute the result. Given the amount of subventions in the US or the EU, we are partially there.
It would be a small shift in our mentalities: food is a necessary item to live, we must all contribute equally for it (as a society) and have easy access to it.
If anything I would be more worry about increasing the quantity of food wasted. Paying, even a little, can be necessary to signify that food is not infinite and growing from nothing, and thus, should not be wasted.
> free food doesn't mean that farmers would work for free.
Definitely, we already heavily subsidize farmers, if the sole source buyer became the federal gov't we could cut out the middle men (Kroger, Walmart, the distribution warehouse chains, food staple speculators) and create a stable food supply for everyone.
Perhaps charge a piecemeal amount beyond a certain quantity, to reduce waste.
> the extreme failure that was the Soviet collectivization
Well, when you come in and break up the existing communes at gunpoint, you can't be surprised that their output drops to zero, combined with forcing the remaining peasants you haven't killed to form farming collectives.
Locally organized farming communes are quite productive, but you need buy-in from members, which takes time, effort, and proper economic incentives.
And the idea of government-run stores ironically already exists in some of the most conservative parts of the US -- not for food, granted, but in several states (North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Utah) liquor stores are state-run in order to control sales. Amusingly, the lack of a profit motive means that often they have better prices than private liquor stores (generally worse selection though).
One of the biggest drivers of the disaster that was Soviet collectivization was a big fear that Lenin was wrong (he was) in his early claims that peasants would support the Bolsheviks.
Classical Marxism is based in part on a hypothesis that a socialist revolution has a number of preconditions, one being an advanced capitalist economy (Russia of course did not meet that), and a second one being that as a consequence of that, a society with a large working class majority (Russia did not meet that either).
Lenin "worked around" this with a pamphlet published in the early 1890's where he argued that Russia was special: In Russia the large number of landless peasants would come to the support of the socialist revolution and make it possible for a socialist party to take control. Coupled with his idea of a "vanguard party" leading the masses, he believed this would allow Russia to basically "skip capitalism".
The big problem with that, of course, was that it never happened: In the elections for the Constituent Assembly arranged by the Provisional Government after the February Revolution, the Bolsheviks got a minority, with almost all their support in the big cities, while the peasants largely voted for more moderate parties - including the socialist SR/Left SR and Mensheviks. So the Bolsheviks went into their coup (the October "revolution" was a coup against the socialist-led Provisional Government; the Tsar had already been in house-arrest for months) in a situation where they must have known that the odds were most peasants would oppose their regime.
Collectivization then must be seen against a backdrop where the Bolsheviks not only had theoretical reasons to want to minimize the peasantry (trying to "leapfrog" capitalism), but also had very practical reasons to want to try to forcibly mold the peasantry into working class: they were afraid that leaving the peasants be would sow the foundations of further opposition.
Lenin relented a bit after the civil war, with New Economic Policy (which allowed limited market economy), but as soon as he died, Stalin pushed collectivization much harder and further, basically on the basis that while he couldn't eradicate farmers, he certainly could do whatever he could to try to turn farming into an industrial job.
So while they undoubtably also hoped to find ways of increasing productivity, it's worth realizing that a lot of decisions they took also had another purpose of basically trying to find a way of "farming without farmers" that was politically important especially for Stalin, and that made many possible concessions that might have mitigated disastrous outcomes completely politically unpalatable for the Bolsheviks because they especially early on feared for their power base. E.g. even the concession they did make under Lenin (NEP) were unpalatable enough for Stalin to reverse them.
It doesn't excuse what they did in any way, of course, but it goes so way towards explaining why they persisted in at times disastrous policies even after they'd clearly learned about the consequences - maintaining power remained more important for them than getting good outcomes.
