Rudy Canoza wrote:
>
> To say that a given amount of land (and other resources) could produce
> more nutrition in the form of vegetables rather than meat, and that
> therefore this makes meat "inefficient", is a fundamental
> misunderstanding of efficiency. If you have a factory producing
> refrigerators, your measure of efficiency is how many refrigerators
> you can produce for a given amount of input resources; or,
> alternatively, for a given output of refrigerators, what's the lowest
> possible amount of resources required to make it. It is incorrect to
> say that the factory is "inefficient" because it could, if slightly
> reconfigured, produce twice as many wa****ng machines. People aren't
> interested in undifferentiated consumer durables, and they're not
> interested in undifferentiated units of calories.
>
We gun fanatics have a similar retort when confronted by those who
declaim:
"No one NEEDS an assault weapon (more than one gun a month, high-capacity
magazines, etc.)."
Our response is simply:
"NEED" is not the operative word; WANT is what counts.
(As an aside, there's a less-convincing, but similar argument, when the
declaration is reworded slightly: "No one NEEDS more than one vehicle. You
can only drive one car at a time!")
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