Amidst all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over Big Oil and Big Aerospace, you'll hardly hear anyone complain about how Big Agriculture costs Americans almost $500 billion per year. Impudent does a good job laying out the case against agricultural subsidies, but I think he misses one key point. On his hit-list:
- Agricultural subsidies aggravate illegal immigration.- Agricultural Subsidies cause havoc in the third world, and are a stumbling block to better relations with our trading partners.
- Farm subsidies don't go to small family farms, they mostly go to huge Agribusiness, like Archer Daniels Midland, Con-Agra, and Dole Pineapple, among others.
- The most successful program to steal your money from you by Agri-business is Ethanol subsidies.
His punches are right on the nose, and I've criticised govnernmental agricultural manipulation before myself, but the one thing Impudent doesn't mention is that America requires an immense agricultural industry for the sake of national security. If we weren't able to grow enough food to feed ourselves we'd be even more dependent on tyrannical third-world countries than we are now. Imagine if tin-pot dictators could threaten us not just with high oil prices, but high food prices! A major world war could easily disrupt shipping and lead to very difficult circumstances if America were not self-sufficient. We need to keep giant farming corporations in business, but the free market price of food would force them to leave their fields barren because yes, the third world can grow food much more cheaply than we can. So it goes. The price of freedom, I suppose.
Thats just the start of the insanity of the farm bill, we spend billions keeping the price of farm goods high only to turn around through food stamps to spend twice as much to help the poor buy food.
The farm bill needs to be taken out behind the barn and shot.
tP: There's almost certainly a simpler alternative to the current system, but don't you agree that we need a string agricultural industry for national security?
The ability and techonlogy to use our agriculture is an important part of national security. However, the protectionist approach hurts consumers, tax payers and national security.
The farm bill is built on some insane idea that farm producats should cost relatively the same abount as they did in the early 1900's. Following that logic to other places, the average car would be over $40,000 to buy a Ransom E. Olds style car, god only knows what a civic would cost with those luxury upgrades like seat belts, A/C and a windshield.
The protectionism closes off our markets to crops that could be grown cheaper in the third world, prohibiting their economies and countries from developing an economic base. This not only leads to some resentment, but keeps them poor costign us money in aid which only serves to prop up despots who in some cases support/protect those who most threaten our national security.
Beyond that many of these farms would still operate with out all the subsides, they just wouldn't make money hand over fist and wouldn't beable to give as much money to politicians. The great myth is the farm bills keep the farms alive, in reality the farm bills isn't about national security or saving farming its about getting farmers rich through government mandated communism.
It would be fairly simple to stock enough food so that we could last out on domestic stuff until we cranked up the fields again. We used to keep multi-year stocks of food in warehouses. We could do so again for national security reasons. Ag subsidies have got to go.
There are a lot of issues here...
on the National Security front, I would say its probably overblown. Oil is only found in a few places in the world in quantity thats available for export. On the other hand, you can grow food just about anywhere. The US could always adopt a policy that says that it won't buy more than x% of any given crop from one country and that would pretty much do it.
Having said that, its tough to say whether the farm belt needs the subsidies that they are looking for. Farm labour is probably cheaper in other countries, but American farms are closer to market and have lower transportation costs.