Food and free markets

Don Boudreaux considers an entertaining counterfactual:

• Grocery School (Cafe Hayek)

Suppose that we were supplied with groceries in same way that we are supplied with K-12 education.

The argument provides an interesting rhetorical angle: given that we need food to live — and that we need it more acutely than, say, education, or health care, or law enforcement — why is no-one up in arms about the fact that we leave its provision to the avaricious and uncaring private sector*?  If inequality in health-care access and public-school quality are signs of our society’s horrid broken-ness, how much worse a sign is the fact that the wealthy — merely by having more filthy lucre — have access to the very best and healthiest foodstuffs, like grass-fed beef tenderloin, fresh-caught wild salmon, and organically-cultivated heirloom produce, while the working poor must content themselves with nutritionally dismal and gastronomically offensive options like off-brand ramen, canned soup, and Wonder Bread?  Doesn’t anyone care about this despicable inequality?

Boudreaux imagines what this indignation would look like in terms of the rhetoric that surrounds non-public schools:

[T]he small handful of people who call for total separation between supermarket and state would be criticized by nearly everyone as being, at best, delusional and – it would be thought more realistically – more likely misanthropic devils who are indifferent to the malnutrion and starvation that would sweep the land if only private market forces governed the provision and patronizing of supermarket.  (Some indignant observers would even wonder aloud at the insensitivity of referring to grocery shoppers as “customers”; surely the relationship between suppliers of life-giving foods and the people who need these foods is not so crass as to be properly discussed as being ‘commercial.’)

As it happens, however, we don’t need to imagine this sort of indignation.  Michael Moynihan discovers that when high-quality food provider Whole Foods tries to open a store that caters to a poor Latino neighbourhood in Boston, rich overeducated white folks are on hand to protest the franchise and keep their booted heel down on the oppressed:

• A Whole Foods fight in Boston (Reason)

(Hat tip: Radley Balko, in an entertaining post you should also read.)

I neglected to mention that the rich overeducated white folks claim to be progressives, and think they’re protesting in the best interests of the neighbourhood’s residents.

Elsewhere, in an article that’s been languishing in my “blog about this” bookmarks for years now, Balko himself reports upon another corporate effort to bring cheap good food to people that smug internet progressives like to mock:

• Does Wal-Mart make you skinny? (Daily Beast)

“We expected the study to show an increase in obesity in communities with a Wal-Mart,” [researcher Art] Carden says. “We know that Wal-Mart lowers the cost of food, but we figured it’s not always the best food for you.”

To their surprise, they found the opposite—there was a small but statistically significant reduction in obesity rates in communities with a Wal-Mart, perhaps because the store also sells fresh produce of good quality at a good price.

Broadening the study to big-box stores in general, the effect was even more pronounced. “People actually bought more produce, more fruits and vegetables,” Carden says. “Instead of just eating more, they ate a higher-quality diet—a lower-fat diet than the rest of the population.”

But of course because Wal-Mart is big and successful and not a union shop, Caring People and Lookers With Concern conclude — based on detailed examination of their feeeeeelings — that it must be a Bad Thing.  Balko reports:

In Chicago in 2006, a proposed Wal-Mart store met with fierce opposition from groups critical of its labor practices—a position just reiterated by Mayor Richard Daley. So instead, Wal-Mart opened in Evergreen Park, one block outside the Chicago city limits. The store received 24,500 job applications for just 325 positions, and now generates more than $1 million per year in taxes for the small town while boosting revenue for local businesses.

Had Chicago’s politicians not been so obstinate, that economic windfall could have been enjoyed by the city’s low-income, mostly minority Chatham neighborhood—whose residents might have dropped some pounds as well.

I’ve long suspected that the two remaining refuges for respectable racism are mercantilist protectionism (“Buy American!  Don’t let the Heathen Chinee steal our jobs!”) and anti-immigrant bias (“It’s not that I don’t like black people, I just don’t want a flood of them to ruin the vibrant and precious Québecois culture!”).  A pair of anecdotes is not data, but it’s starting to look like I’ve found a third.

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* Blah blah blah farm subsidies blah; yes, I know.  T’ain’t the same thing.