Asking the gov to proactively shrink or limit animal products is a non-starter because there are just too many (voting) consumers who would be outraged. It would be political suicide. Same for cars. Forcing car owners out of cars would be political suicide as well.
But what I find baffling is there seems to be no chatter about the fact that the US gov gives (millions?) in subsidies to livestock farmers. And Europe gives tax breaks for “commercial” cars (mischaracterized personal cars). If the gov were to end the subsidies, there could be no reasonable complaint that the gov is interfering. Because in fact the gov would be ending their intervention.
That’s all you get when you’ve got a system where the accumulation of political power through the accumulation of capital is aided and abetted. Agriculture is a politically powerful lobby so they get taxpayer dollars every year and lax supervision through regulatory capture.
Veg farmers fall under that same lobby though, right? So what if the feds say “you’ll get the same amount of subsidies but every year 20% of the livestock subsidies will shift to veg farmer subsidies”?
They’d only say that if the vegetable farmers were offering the politicians more money.
It’s the economic system of distribution that’s the issue. That’s why 10% of our gas is corn. Why the USDA food pyramid had 11 servings of grain. Business and government will continue to merge until we replace the capitalist government with a socialist one. Then at least we’d have a chance of government doing what voters want. As long as the government and the working class are different groups of people, people will always be looking for ineffectual patches for a broken system.