I also believe that using baking soda is preferable to toothpaste, especially flouride toothpaste. It is also vastly cheaper. Just try getting your kids to use it! It canges the PH of your mouth and kills decay-causing bacteria. it also freshens breath better than toothpaste.
On the topic of food expense. One of the U.S.‘s persistent domestic economic policies has been to encourage the production of very inexpensive foodstuffs. I think this policy is destructive. I don’t think we subsidize agribusiness to keep it in business (a bad idea anyway), we subsidize it to keep food cheap for export and to enable the government to highly regulate its production. The U.S. would probably be out of the sugar business were it not for subsidies. I’m trying to think of a strategic need for sugar but can’t at the moment. Wouldn’t a cheap domestic price level act as a barrier to entry of foreign foodstuffs -almost like a hidden tariff? More expensive food means that small farms can be more profitable, as it levels the playing field between them and industrial producers. This might serve to make farming more of an option for entrepreneurship. I’m only speculating here. Ideally, families would largely produce their own food, not for sale per se, but for the purpose of economic independence. Of course, agriculture is not the only solution, since it requires a “market” for one’s produce in order to bring money into the household economy. This is why I emphasize that Kinism is also concerned with the development of the domestic artisan economy through the plying of trades and skills. This would bring a stable basis to the household economy, be a boon to independence, and permit the transition to total self-reliance that industrialism’s acute division of labor prevents. Thus we avoid charges that Kinism wants to turn everyone into dirt farmers. There is a role for highly skilled trades and professions in village life, entailing the need for a hard currency to promote exchange and to act as a brake on inflation.
Now, the “leave it alone” market supporter in me howls at the notion, but if sugar is so destructive to health, wouldn’t we want it to be expensive? But looking into it more deeply, it is not artificial barriers that keep it cheap, it is subsidized domestic production. Living in a cane producing state, we see the effects of this in the puperization of the field hands. Nevertheless, what we call pauperization and what the Bible refers to as poverty are degrees apart. Further, doesn’t government subsidized health care increase the utility of poor health decisions? Would people alter their habits if we didn’t subsidize health care through Medicaid, or would they simply drop dead at a higher rate? Perhaps we are indirectly subsidizing agribusiness and packaged food and food additive producers by lowering the cost of poor health decisions, transferring those costs to the health sector of the economy.
It looks like subsidization is bad all around, not to mention it’s a form of fascist economy. Every man under his own vine and fig tree seems like the best option for a fulfilled and healthy life.
