Food Speculation

Food speculation: People die from hunger while banks make a killing on food | The Observer

A couple of thoughts on this.

First of all, it's a good example of a problem with an unregulated, free-market, capitalist system. Greed. The pure capitalist will manipulate any market if there are profits to be made. There are never enough profits. It doesn't matter if millions of people are financially destroyed in the process, or if they die of warfare or starvation, it's OK if profits were created for someone.

There's a good argument here for increasing taxes on the wealthy. As the worlds richest groups have accumulated larger and larger shares of the world's wealth, they've created huge pools of money that rocket around the financial markets searching for profits creating havoc where ever they flow. We seen it in the Dotcom bubble, Enron and Electricity markets, the housing bubble, the derivitive bubble, Oil prices, food prices, etc. The excess profits that fill these coffers should be taxed at a level to reduce their abilty to corrupt markets.

tnb