Winning the War at Any Cost

Anchorage is a transportation hub for North America. Everything being flown to/from North America from/to Europe, Asia, or the Middle East goes through here. Transportation companies, Fed Ex, everyone, have large pieces of their infrastructure here with the people to manage it. Sunday I met one of these managers at a BBQ and he got to talking about what gets transported.

The menu had asparagus, which got him talking about asparagus and where it comes from. He told us that the US now gets its asparagus from Columbia. Why? Well, to combat the farmers making money growing coco plants for cocaine, the U.S. gov't subsidizes them to grow asparagus, which they then fly to distribution centers throughout the U.S. so we can eat it.

So we can buy it 'fresh' it is harvested very green and stored in an inert gas, probably nitrogen. Then to 'ripen' it, it is then subjected to an oxygen rich atmosphere. I don't know if this reduces the nutrition of the food or not. In fact, we may benefit from this process since we get asparagus at the 'peak of ripeness'.

What I see as ridiculous is them flying a vegetable across two continents to 'fight a drug war.'
The American asparagus farmers now cannot compete with a government subsidized competitor. What is ironic is it is their own government that is subsidizing their competition and forcing them out of business.

Where's John Cougar singing about and for the American Farmer when you need him?

So it doesn't matter if it costs $20/pound to fly asparagus from South America to North America, it'll get paid to fight the drug war. Who pays this? Us the taxpayer, that's who.

Are you starting to get angry? Out gov't is using our tax dollars to put American farmers out of business and cocaine is still readily available everywhere in this country.

To me this sounds like a big waste of our money.

ASIDE:

I just checked. It costs $3.85 to ship a pound from Anchorage to Miami 3 day priority mail (Express mail was over $17). It probably costs more than this to fly produce internationally, but I'll use this value as a basis for a quick and dirty analysis.

Our gov't is about 12% efficient. For every dollar spent, 88 cents goes to overhead, and is essentially lost. This means that for our gov't to achieve a $3.85 value, it'll spend $30.80 since the bureaucracy will eat up $26.95.

No wonder my taxes are so high.

It's worse than I thought.