Dat inequality

[Renton]

How about giving everyone free healthy and nutritious food. Maybe open up a shitty looking cheap ass cafe in every town run by the government that will give anyone who walks through the door a really healthy dinner, no questions asked, every day of the year if need be. May as well throw in free school meals for everyone as well, but has to be really healthy.

Well it's a huge matter of opinion what constitutes a nutritious meal, or even what the meaning of the word "healthy" is. A cursory look at health/diet forums would make this fact pretty obvious. Some people think red meat is unhealthy, some people think all meat is unhealthy, in the 80s/90s everyone thought fat was unhealthy, in the 2000s it was carbs.

Capitalism has already gone a long way toward solving the problem of starvation in 5 of the 6 inhabited continents by making food incredibly cheap. A government restaurant that gives free meals to people would probably just become perpetually mega-crowded by people who could afford to eat but would rather not pay for food. One of the major things prices do is provide a signal for conservation and sharing of resources, including food. Without this signal, its impossible to accurately and conservatively distribute anything.

As a side point, when you displace someone's monetary obligation for food, they are likely to spend that money on things that they need less than food. A focused example of this problem is if you buy groceries for your crackhead family member out of the goodness of your heart, you're just enabling him to buy more crack since he's no longer obligated to spend that money on food.

There are just a lot of paradoxically negative effects of such a well intentioned program as that.




edit: I forgot to note that your program, if implemented on a large scale, would also potentially cause a dramatic increase in the prices of all food, and increase the chances of a widespread food shortage. It would do so by disrupting supply and demand, which depends on prices, and inflating demand since people use more than they need when the resource is without cost.