Saturday, July 15, 2017

Amazon Prime does more for northern food security than federal subsidies, say Iqaluit residents

See By David Henderson of EconLog.
"The consensus in Iqaluit seems to be that everyone with a credit card has an Amazon Prime membership. That's because people can often find groceries cheaper online than in local stores, despite government food subsidy programs. "Amazon Prime has done more toward elevating the standard of living of my family than any territorial or federal program. Full stop. Period," a local principal, who declined to speak further, said on Facebook.
With an annual fee of about $80, Amazon Prime members can get free and faster shipping.

This is from Sara Frizzell, "Amazon Prime does more for northern food security than federal subsidies, say Iqaluit residents," CBC News, July 10, 2017. 
This reminds me of a line that George Stigler used in a famous article titled "The Intellectual and the Marketplace":

Sears, Roebuck and Company and Montgomery Ward made a good deal of money in the process of improving our rural marketing structure, but I am convinced that they did more for the poor farmers of America than the sum total of the federal agricultural support programs of the last five decades.

I used this quote in my bio of Stigler.
 See here for a slightly different version of the quote.

Stigler was such a master of the pithy one or two liner that I included a special section, titled "Straight Talk from Stigler," in his biography in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. And I had trouble narrowing it down to 5 such quotes."

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