This thread discusses the Content article: Government Intervention At Work

Interestingly, the Liberals are looking at this from a different side of the issue: they see global food riots and the possibility of global famine based on the Ethanol initiative.

The premises they state are as follows:

1. it costs more money to produce ethanol from corn than fuel from other resources
   • this increase in cost of fuel production, along with the various pressures on the price of oil (presumably all of it increased demand rather than deliberate reduction in oil production or reduction in reserves and resources), is causing the cost of oil to rise even faster than it otherwise would
   • the upward pressure on the price of oil is making it less profitable both to import foreign foods and to export foods to other countries
2. the diversion of corn to fuel removes corn from the food supply, raising the price of food-supply corn
3. the globalization of the food economy, including economies of scale, has caused many developing areas to move from subsistence farming to cash-crop farming, making them unable to feed themselves in the absence of food imports and foreign food aid (mostly in the form of US-originated corn)
   • again, due to the increasing price pressure of oil costs, these countries are unable to export their cash crops at a profit and are unable to import subsistence crops

These Liberals have reported widespread food riots in places such as India and the Koreas, and governments having to release their emergency reserves of food both to provision their citizens at all, and to feed them at a price they can afford. They call for a US-remediated return to local subsistence farming in these nations, and a global return to local organic subsistence farming, with a call for consumers to demand the same. (These are the same folk that blame both globalized agroindustry and a patchworked set of US food-inspection and -regulation agencies for things such as the recent tomato-based salmonella outbreak, and call for a single food-production-and-inspection regulatory authority in the US... which I expect would make it all but impossible to have a local dairy farm or a local veggie farm and market one's crops.)

I'm not sure where the truth lies or how blame should be apportioned here, but the bottom line is as it has always been (at least since the Industrial Revolution): poor people only exist to make rich people richer, and the faster you can replace poor people with machines, and the more you can produce in less time, less area, and for less cost (presuming as always that machines are more efficient than people), the faster the rich will get richer.