The above is the headline of a CNS news story about a farm funding bill (that touches all kinds of other things besides farm subsidies) that is currently being worked on by Congress.
It cites religious leaders from a variety of groups urging more "justice" and "fairness" in the bill.
I agree with them.
The bill does need more justice and fairness.
But I think I’m viewing what counts as justice and fairness through a somewhat different lens than the people quoted in the article (or at least many of them; there is one guy at the end who may be more on the same page I am).
To my mind, making the bill more just and fair would involve this: ending all farm subsidies.
Government subsidies create a distorting effect in the economy and make it inefficient. Carried to extremes, you could get things like what you had in Soviet Russia, where bread was so cheap that people were feeding it to farm animals at the same time they were unable to get basic foodstuffs other than bread.
The issue of farm subsidies was a big deal back in the 1970s, when there was a lot of concern about the disappearance of family farms in the face of advancing technology and economic development in the agriculture industry.
I understood the pain of the people who were having to break from a family tradition of being farmers, but the government should not be in the business of funding family traditions at taxpayer expense. If that was the government’s job then it should have subsidized all the horse breeders and stable managers and veterinarians and carriage makers and street cleaners that existed at the time the automobile was introduced, so that they could keep their prior occupations even though a new and better means of personal transportation had been developed.
And it should have subsidized all of the old radio networks once television came along.
And it should have subsidized Hollywood studios once television came along.
It should similarly subsidize newspapers now that the Internet is putting them out
of business.
And it should similarly subsidize everyone in every occupation so that they can maintain their traditional way of life when a new and better means of doing the same thing comes along.
Such a society, of course, would be completely unworkable. You wouldn’t have the economic resources you’d need to maintain a huge chunk of the population in obsolete, unneeded jobs and simultaneously maintain a new, separate economy–or set of economies–based on more efficient means of doing the same things. The whole thing would be an arcane mess that would impoverish people by stifling economic development and burdening the population with an even more massive tax load than it currently bears.
So if this is unworkable for society as a whole then justice and fairness would dictate that there not be privileged groups–like family farmers and agri-business conglomerates–that get subsidies.
Of course, if all subsidies vanished overnight there would be a massive shock to the system, so it could be reasonable to phase them out over time, and one could argue that there should be measures to help people find new lines of work (which would cost far less than maintaining the subsidies indefinitely), but the goal should be eliminating the subsidies, not ramping them up.
GET THE STORY.
