yeah lowering the standard of living is not popular. i don’t think complete self-sufficiency is necessarily the goal i’m thinking of, as much as minimising logistics costs. there’s also the resiliency factor; every european nation being self-sufficient in crucial areas like food, medicine, electricity etc and trading the surplus would make for a very strong continent.

there’s a lot of talk here about buying local now, like i’d imagine there is in most of europe. we still have local farms, but buying meat from brazil of all places is still marginally cheaper because they produce so much and have more lax standards for, say, how much antibiotics can be used on the animals (here that makes the meat prohibited to sell). i’m not saying to artificially modify pricing to privilege local production but i feel like there must be… something.

i think the finns did a ubi experiment pretty recently. the execution was a bit flawed, but the results were positive.