Screw ups by the Private Sector

I have been hard on the government with the past two posts, so here is an example of private industry out to get us. This mess began with large agricultural corporations lobbing the government for agricultural subsidies and price supports. The government then agreed to heavily subsidize corn. Private businesses produce this cheap corn and then feed it to animals, which in turn makes meat production cheap. Large corporations, along with government agencies, indoctrinate consumers with propaganda that misleads them into thinking that meat is nutritionally necessary and even healthy. Therefore, the demand for meat is high. The private companies that produce this cheap meat externalize the environmental costs onto all of us. Here is a quick description from the above link regarding the scale of environmental costs passed by the meat industry onto all of us:

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in a report called "Livestock's Long Shadow," says, "The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."

Meat producers can pollute all they want and not pay any direct costs. In order to make the producers bear the costs of pollution, the pollutants themselves must be turned into tradable commodities. To accomplish this objective, the government can establish a tolerable level of pollution and issue permits that can be purchased and traded by producers. Each permit would allow a producer to emit a certain level of pollution. The permits allow the producers to efficiently allocate the right to pollute amongst themselves.