The Great Salad Shortage of Winter 2023 has been met by a claim that we must subsidise inefficient salad producers. Or inefficient farmers:

“We need to find a more sustainable way of trading fresh produce," he says. "When I say sustainable, that's got to be sustainable in terms of viability for small producers, in terms of the social impact, food prices, and sustainable in terms of not imposing a negative impact on the environment.”

No. Simply no. The particular part that is wrong is the “sustainable in terms of viability for small producers”.

The background assumption being made is that small producers are inefficient producers. That’s why they need that special care and loving attention to stay in business. But fixing the marketplace so that inefficient producers stay in business is the very definition of stopping us all from getting richer.

We are - of course - made richer in every very real sense by using the least inputs possible to the maximum output we can lay hands upon. That means that our aim in the economy is to destroy jobs. We want to reduce, to whatever irreducible minimum is possible with the current state of technology, the amount of human labour that has to go into whatever it is that we desire.

That labour can then stop growing cucumbers and go off and be ballet dancers, nurses in the NHS or, heaven forfend, produce something useful. We are made richer by now having ballet, nurses and or something useful plus the cucumbers now being more efficiently produced.

Far from wanting to fix the system so that inefficient producers stay in business we desire, lust after, their failing and as soon as possible.

The aim and method of economic advance is to kill jobs, d’ye see? To drive inefficient producers over the cliff edge into bankruptcy so that we can redeploy those ill-used scarce economic resources to do something else.

It is not necessarily true that small producers are inefficient producers. But if the assumption were not being made that they are then there would be no need for a call for a new system to make it viable for small producers, would there?

Make Britain richer, kill a job today.