Chapter 7: Playing Hardball: Legal and Not

I wasn't really surprised to hear about price fixing in the "hardballing" chapter of Food Politics. The US government has come to rely too heavily on subsidization; it makes sense that industry would try their hand at it to reap a greater profit. These legal and illegal forms of price fixing are definitely stop-gap solutions. I'm not a fan of government subsidization either: I believe that it unfailingly leads to surplus, waste, and yet more subsidization. A particular quote in the Feed Additives segment struck me as particularly worrisome: "we have a saying at this company...our competitors are our friends and our customers are our enemies." This falls quite far from the American ideal: "the customer is always right."
I have no doubt that price fixing is much more common than is publicized. I do doubt that many Americans realize how far from a free market America has actually come. I think the eventual solution will have to be in the form of government regulation, but instead of regulating the cost only, I believe that the amount of food produced will have to be controlled as well.