If farmers want to maximize profit why don't they withhold grain to the point where people are so hungry they are...

What do you think Venezuelan farmers are doing right now?

Oh, cool, gorillaposter is back.

they won't be farmers for very long if they do that, they won't be anything for very long if they do that

That's pretty much what farmers do. 670 million tonnes of corn and wheat are rotting away because farmers are waiting for the prices to go up

mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN17D0EO

winner winner chicken dinner
everyone can go home now, thread's over

typical crisis of overproduction
and people say marx is outdated

Yep, and look what it got them.

They'd eat cakes?

You realise you would have to control all the grain on earth for that to work?

but this is essentially what is happening right now, except that "regular farmers" have the shorter leverage and its corporations that are destroying perfectly good food and purposefully build electronics to break just after the warrant expires

you do know that this is happening in a massive scale, right?

… right?

you don't actually believe that "bio fuel" had any other motive behind it than basically creating demand for farmers?

That has literally happened in every major famine for the last two centuries.

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I can't believe anyone can read something like this and conclude that the Kulaks didnt deserve it.

Are you leftyfags honestly this fucking retarded? Farmers are not a singular entity, farming is an occupation. If a group of farmers stopped selling their grain other farmers would be selling theirs for an increased profit, it's supply and demand.

Farmers don't sell the grain, wealthy traders and merchants do, you idiot.

Read it and weep right-wing nerd

Retard, nobody is doing that. Vegetables are cheap as fuck in Venezuela.

In Maracaibo, 1kg of plantains costs 1500 to 2000 bolívares.

No, more like that's what the government does… corn production is subsidized, they get paid to produce a surplus. Monsanto Corn TM.

What the fuck is this, mount and blade? You realize that farmers aren't peasants, right? We live in a post industrial age, most farmers make a very decent amount of money. Figures… your ideology is from the industrial age.

That's what grain silos are for

The mind of a market-cuck never cease to amaze

Not an argument.

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If you're talking about the United States it doesn't happen because of subsidies. Why risk your manipulation of the market not working when you are guaranteed profit from Uncle Sam?

The production of food in the US is pretty heavily socialized, the sale of it is not.

And it does happen a lot in other countries.

Why is every thread with this fucking gorilla picture so insipid like holy shit

Alright, I'll be serious for a second.

I won't pretend I know the full reasons behind their economic disaster, but if I had to bet, most of it is the fault of one single measure: price control.

Historically, price control has always been a disaster for the non-planned economies that adopted it. Price is one of the core mechanisms of an economy: if you fiddle with it instead of letting supply and demand do its job, you indirectly affect every other part of the economy, and needless to say, you have no idea where, how many and how bad these changes will be (by the same token, economic actors fiddling with prices via hoarding, for example, should be fought).

One of the "funny" things about price control is that it leads producers to hoard their goods, thus creating consumer shortages, and it reduces their productive capacity at the same time, thus making the shortages worse. Brazil went through the exact same problem in the 80s, but it didn't cause that much damage because the price control lasted only 11 months. Venezuela has had it for years.

I've been thinking of starting a topic about it.

Also, it can be said that price controls were the reason for the USSR's chronic shortages. But that is a matter for yet another topic.

Because withholding to that degree decreases quantity supplied from the equilibrium vastly out of proportion to the increase of the price, decreasing profit
Even monopolies don't do that

Because the best way to get people to revolt is to starve them. Well fed proles are more complacent.

Grain silos are for storing grain through winter.

No, farm owners make a decent amount of money. Actual farmers are lucky if they get minimum wage.

It is an argument seeing how the farmers across breadbaskets globally with different government policies are all hoarding grain and hoping for the price to go up. That's about as close to free-market conditions were ever gonna get in the real world and it shows that the problem really is capitalism and not muh big gubmint, muh subsidies etc.

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Marginalism has been refuted repeatedly. We've all been through Economics 101 here and moved past it.
users.wfu.edu/cottrell/eea97.pdf
No, it isn't. Russia had documented famines starting around the year 1127 (when it became heavily settled; this was all owing to the fickleness of steppe soil's output) & continued to have them regularly up until Stalin industrialized agriculture. Stalin didn't cause famines - he ended them by industrializing agriculture and having the kolhozi produce consistent surpluses. Ever since the final famine of 1946, there hasn't been a single one in Russia.

But… I didn't say anything about it, did I? At least not intentionally.

All I did was say that price controls don't work for non-centrally planned economies, while planned ones obviously rely on it, which is fine. However, there's still the matter of how to calculate the price correctly, to optimize it. The farther it is from optimal, the more it unbalances an entire production chain. That's what I meant by the shortages in Soviet economy: unoptimized prices were the main culprit. I didn't say anything about famines, that's another issue altogether.

You've been posting in the cybernetics thread too, I take it?

Yeah that's what a farmer is you dolt: a farm owner. Nobody calls farm workers farmers.