A closer look
During the absolute worst depths of the Great Depression, the United States government actually paid desperate farmers to slaughter millions of baby pigs and completely destroy acres of perfectly good crops while millions of poor citizens were actively starving in the streets. The terrifying logic behind this Agricultural Adjustment Act was that heavily reducing the massive oversupply of food would artificially force market prices back up, thereby saving the agricultural industry from total financial ruin. While it technically worked to stabilize farming economics, the optical nightmare of the government actively burning mountains of edible corn and tossing livestock into mass graves during a nationwide famine was brutally dystopian. It perfectly highlights the psychotic, unyielding nature of capitalist pricing mechanics, where it is deemed mathematically more responsible to incinerate life-saving resources than to simply give them away to desperately hungry people for free
