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Give Me Liberty or Give Me Subsidies

04-05-2009

Farm subsidies are defended by people who are otherwise fiscally conservative. Farming enjoys reverence in America; many of our ancestors farmed - as recently as a century ago, most Americans farmed. My grandparents and my wife's grandparents farmed. One could say that, as Americans, farming is in our collective blood. Today, when most of us are urban dwellers, we wrap farm life in a kind of fanciful memory that casts it as simpler, closer to the earth, more honest and more rigorous than our pencil-pushing jobs.

Yet this pride in our country's agricultural heritage cannot be allowed to excuse the excesses of government micromanagement that characterize US farm policy today. This micromanagement is not, in fact, swaddling and guarding a way of life that would otherwise be swept away by the tide of progress. In fact, if we can agree that the small farmer truly represents the American ideal of rugged independence, then they must be defended against the pestilence of government just as surely as their crops must be secured and insured against the ravages of nature.

Far from preserving the independence, ingenuity, and determination that are the strengths of American farming, subsidies and micromanagement exploit a gross caricature of American freedom precisely for the purpose of eroding the individual's subsistence on any source of strength and wisdom other than the government's. As the planned farming of the old Communist bloc showed us, that is a recipe for failure, not only because the model is economically unsustainable, but because the task of farming requires a desire to compete against the elements, endure and/or triumph, and then fairly compete in the market place so as to enjoy the fruit of one's labors -- all motivations that the government does not provide.

Farm lobbyists for big agri-business nurture and exploit our near-patriotic reverence for farming in order to give the biggest players in the industry huge government handouts and leverage their advantage over small farmers who must merge and buy more expensive equipment to compete, or else quit the business. And even as the federal government nurtures the biggest players in the market, those who produce the handful of subsidized commodity crops, it micromanages the food industry and local markets that can be an outlet to small farms. It uses arguments of food safety or market price management to intrude into the farmers markets, whole food and organic food stores, and even produce stands to deprive the small farmer of opportunities to earn an honest profit by selling to a ready market. And of course, in doing so, they are also punishing the consumer, doubly taxing him - once to support the biggest players with subsidies, and then by making him pay the artificially high price for food that results from a lack of fair market competition.

Current US policy sprang from temporary, emergency relief measures enacted by FDR during the depression. They provide a prime illustration of the staying power of any government intervention that begins as "emergency" and "temporary." It illustrates that government uses emergencies to get their foot in the door and then take over the show, depriving once-free citizens of the liberty to control their own lives and rise or fall as a result of their own efforts. In agriculture, government has persuaded too many people that it provides a "safety net" for farmers when, in fact, it pays most farmers next to nothing but does weigh them down with pages upon pages of regulations telling them what they can grow, how much they can grow, how much they can sell it for, and how much they better invest in bigger and better equipment they can't actually afford if they are going to compete with the bloating agri-businesses that are the disproportionate recipients of the USDA's largess and, coincidentally, some of the biggest donors to many a congressman's campaign.

The best the United States government can do by farmers large and small is to allow them to compete on an equal footing and succeed or fail to the degree every other enterprise in America does. American farmers are the most productive in the world, and unfettered by market restrictions and production restrictions, would expand productivity and provide better and cheaper food to the nation and the world, all at a healthy profit.

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