Cafe Hayek

There's No Farm Bill Like No Farm Bill

This letter of mine is published in today's edition of the Washington Times:

No farm bill is best farm bill

Among the jobs of any secretary of agriculture is to portray the administration as smart, fiscally responsible and in awe of farmers' goodness and wisdom. Secretary Chuck Conner tries to do his duty in "Farmers deserve better" (Commentary, yesterday).

But those of us who don't work for the Beltway circus should ignore the corny debate over the relative merits of the Bush administration's offensively expensive farm bill against those of Congress' obscenely expensive alternative bill.

We should instead tell our "leaders" that the best farm bill is no farm bill. There is no sound reason for government to subsidize farmers or to protect them from foreign competitors. Any farmer or rancher too incompetent to produce food that consumers pay for voluntarily should find other employment.

DONALD J. BOUDREAUX
Chairman
Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax

And Think of the Horrors Unleashed by Penicillin!

Here's one of the most absurdly ridiculous lines that I've read in a long time; it was penned by Alexander Cockburn, writing in the November 5, 2007 issue of The Nation:

Line up some of the more notorious Nobel Peace Prize recipients, such as Kissinger, and if you had to identify the biggest killer of all it was probably Norman Borlaug, one of the architects of the Green Revolution, which unleashed displacement, malnutrition and death across the Third World.

Shameful, on so many levels (one of which is that this sentiment drains credibility from the bulk of this article by Cockburn, which attempts to expose Al Gore's hypocrisy).

(HT: Joe Mann)

By the way, Gregg Easterbrook, in his tribute to Norman Borlaug (from the January 1997 issue of The Atlantic) wrote that

Perhaps more than anyone else, Borlaug is responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in sub-Saharan Africa, global food production has expanded faster than the human population, averting the mass starvations that were widely predicted -- for example, in the 1967 best seller Famine -- 1975!   The form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths.

And here's an earlier entry from here at the Cafe about Dr. Borlaug.

Monsanto Saves Lives

Want to know one way that a multinational corporation and the profit motive combine to save the lives of many Africans?  You can find out here.

Assistance Please!

I will soon begin writing a book on globalization.

As a consequence, I wonder if Uncle Sam will consider me to be a worthy candidate for "trade-adjustment assistance" -- that is, to pay me if I can demonstrate that I suffer from foreign competition.  After all, the world is full of superb, non-American writers on globalization, such as Johan Norberg and Martin Wolf.  The books these gentlemen have written, and will surely write in the future, might well reduce market demand for my book, causing me to earn less income than I would earn were I protected from the competition of these and other foreign writers.

Why shouldn't I apply for such assistance?  If being subjected to foreign competition entitles blueberry and lychee-nut growers, catfish farmers, and several bushels of other American producers to taxpayer money, aren't I also entitled to have my representatives on Capitol Hill pick Americans' pockets on my behalf?

I Have a Beef

I'm riding in my car this morning and I hear this ad for beef on the radio.  The voiceover is a quintessential cowboy voice.  It sounds just like Sam Elliot, the guy who played "The Stranger" in "The Big Lebowski."  He's talking about the primal experience of cooking meat on an open fire and then eating it.

The ad ended this way:

"Beef—it's what's for dinner.  Funded by America's beef producers with Chekhov dollars."

Chekhov dollars?  I know he wrote "The Cherry Orchard."  Did he also write "The Cattle Range?"  Naw.  I must have heard it wrong.   It must have been "check-off dollars."  That's weird, I thought.  The only "check-off" funding I know is on my tax return.

Unfortunately, there is another.

Actually, there are a lot of them.  There's a mushroom one and an avocado one and a potato one and a popcorn one and a lime one and, well, you get the idea.

I always assumed those ads were part of a coalition of producers that somehow evaded the antitrust laws.  Actually, it turns out that the Department of Agriculture creates the coalition by taxing the producers, then using the money to promote consumption.  Not surprisingly, how the money gets spent is a source of endless bureaucratic delight:

In accordance with the Beef Promotion Research Act and Order, the Cattlemen's Beef Board must contract with national industry-governed organizations to implement programs funded with beef checkoff dollars. The Beef Board solicits proposals from potential contractors through an annual Request for Proposal process. The Beef Promotion Operating Committee reviews proposals from contractors for programs to be pursued with checkoff dollars. The Board approves a budget, and the Operating Committee then chooses from the submitted proposals " or its amended versions of them " to determine the best use of beef checkoff dollars in the authorized areas of promotion, research, consumer information, industry information, foreign marketing and producer communication. Final approval must come from the USDA. This section of the Web site provides an overview of some portions of those programs completed with checkoff dollars, under the requirements of the Beef Act and Order.

While it's called a "checkoff program" which suggest it's voluntary, it appears to be mandatory in the beef business.  Each producer pays $1 per head of cattle.  A somewhat comprehensible description of the program is here.

Fortunately, the constitutionality of the program appears to be before the Supreme Court.  A history of the litigation is here.

I wonder how much of the burden of this tax falls on consumers.  What a great country we live in where the government helps raise money for farmers to use to convince us to buy their products.