super-capitalist market-forces brochure bait

It's so wonderful that the U.S. federal government has to subsidize the agricultural industry to make their free market system work. /s

You suggest SM is not a good idea but you don't point out an alternative, beggaring the question.

Because I've had this discussion ad nauseum. The idea that there's literally no alternative to SM for dairy only makes sense if you carefully ignore every other country.

Surely you don't think the American super-capitalist market-forces brochure bait is better.

I don't know what you think the Americans do, but what they actually do is heavily subsidize their dairy industry (tens of billions) which drives down costs of dairy and causes their industry to oversupply which means they have lots of cheap milk (some of it of dubious quality) to export . If a country simply opens their market to American dairy without restrictions, it often leads to local industry getting wiped out as a result.

I am not suggesting we open our market in this way, nor is any sane person. But the subsidy model is better than SM. It's less heavy-handed, allows for new entrants into the market, and we can open our borders with caveats (tariffs on subsidized dairy, quality rules). Plenty of countries do it.

Unrelated, but I never really understood how the Eastern dairy lobbies were able to dominate politics so completely whereas the wheat board in the west was essentially destroyed

Supply Management. Dairy is not a free market in Canada. It is a cartel in which each producer gets a quota. The US complains about it constantly because they massively over-produce dairy, which drops the price of US dairy products, which they then want to export to Canada. It would give us consumers lower prices, but would probably kill our dairy indistry. Or at least that's what we are told. I don't have enough knowledge to say whether that story is valid.