>I would much rather the US spend $2.2B on corn subsidies so that we have food security in the event of a global catastrophe. I’d prefer eating nothing but corn flour/meal for years than starving to death.
There are definitely other options, I’m not trying to present a false dilemma. My point is that spending 0.03% of total federal expenditures to guarantee food security is money well spent. Subsidizing other crops would work, it just happens to be easy to industrialize and automate corn farming and there’s plenty of good agricultural land in the US that is suited to grow corn.
Are those really the only two options?