Economic Calculation Problem Reloaded

Colby Cosh on "Food Miles", another feel good carbosocialist riff that sounds doomed to counter productivity:

The problem of determining which bag of onions might involve the release of the least carbon would require the solving of a vast array of equations, too great for the human mind even to teach a computer to solve. Since every purchase made in a free economy is chiefly a purchase of many kinds of stored energy, it may even be that buying the cheapest food is the closest possible approximation humans can make to measuring their "environmental footprint" at the supermarket.

With the enormous agricultural and transportation subsidies in the mix, the economy's not all that free of course, but who on earth knows how many idiot government programs ultimately cancel themselves out. The point, as Jay Currie remarks, is that:

...what such diet and energy fads are about is economic illiteracy combined with an authoritarian streak. They are efforts to make peoples lives more difficult for no particularly good reason. And they should be resisted to the very last drop of the Volanay and slice of imported, unpasteurized, Brie.

# 3:37 PM