A Contrarian Agrarian

The Dallas Morning News has an interview up that Rod Dreher conducted with Texas State University’s James McWilliams, a self-identified “agrarian” who’s already made a name for himself (see here for an especially angry (and especially profanity-laden) response) as a critic of the excesses of the “locavore” movement. The interview touches on a range of different topics aside from the problems with “food miles”, and is quite informative and well worth reading in its entirety; for example, I’m not sure whether I’d fully understood this before:

… grass-fed cows require up to 10 acres of land per cow. And the cows emit four times the methane of conventional cows. It’s not sustainable. Methane is 21 times more powerful than carbon as greenhouse gas. In the end, it’s hard, if not impossible, to be a meat-eating environmentalist. It is for that reason that the most effective thing a socially conscious eater can do is reduce, if not eliminate, meat consumption altogether. Not a very popular thing to say in Texas, but there you have it.

In my home, we’re solidly on the “reduce” side; especially with growing children and a perpetually pregnant and/or breastfeeding mom, going off meat altogether just isn’t an option for us. But we usually go heavy on the vegetables and grains and then restrict ourselves to much smaller portions when it comes to meat: hence a third of a pound of ground beef, say, is usually enough for all three of us. I hadn’t, however, understood that grass-fed cows actually emit more methane than, er, “conventional” ones – though as McWilliams says, the environmental (and ethical) disaster that is factory farming is clearly not a better alternative.

Here’s the concluding bit from the interview, where McWilliams speculates on what the future of food ought to look like:

There’s an instinctive and quite understandable tendency to look at the problems of industrialized food and seek solutions in the agricultural past. The assumption, however, that our forebears hold all the answers is a bit romantic. We have to keep in mind that the world’s population has more than quadrupled since 1900, so the pre-industrial food systems that we often mythologize were nowhere near as burdened to achieve high yields. Beyond that, I’ve never been terribly convinced that pre-industrial food was so safe or ecologically correct.

The future of food production must achieve a balance between high yields and high sustainability. The only way I see this happening is if we stop polarizing our discussions of food into big industrial and small organic, and start seeking common ground over compromises that split differences. We’ll have to eat much less meat, many more whole grains, fruits, vegetables and legumes; tolerate the judicious use of chemicals in the production of our food; keep an open mind to the potential benefits of biotechnology; and worry less about the distance our food traveled than the overall energy it took to produce it.

As an aside, let me just say that it’s really this sort of compromising spirit that I was so frustrated to see missing from that NRO piece on Alice Waters. In any case, do read the whole thing.

Elsewhere: McWilliams’s forthcoming, provocatively-titled book.

Filed under: agriculture, environment, food

There Oughtta Be a Law …

When I came across this New York Times article about large vegetable growers and other segments of the industrial food industry who are paying out of pocket to hire inspectors and implement production guidelines and safety standards that go beyond the FDA minimums, I figured it would be a great opportunity to crack some jokes about how this really goes to show that market pressures aren’t enough, and our food safety laws really need to be stricter. Turns out, I didn’t need to joke:

These do-it-yourself programs may provide an enhanced safety level in segments of the industry that have embraced them. But with industry itself footing the bill, some safety advocates worry that the approach could introduce new problems and new conflicts of interest. And they contend that the programs lack the rigor of a well-run federal inspection system.

“It’s an understandable response when the federal government has left a vacuum,” said Michael R. Taylor, a former officer in two federal food-safety agencies and now a professor at George Washington University. But, he added, “it’s not a substitute” for serious federal regulation.

[…]

“Industry self-regulation didn’t protect our money, and industry self-regulation won’t protect our food,” said Carol L. Tucker-Foreman, a safety advocate with the Consumer Federation of America, in an e-mail message. “We want every inspector to be paid by and owe their loyalty to the people who eat, not to the owner of an unsanitary produce packing operation. You can’t work for both.”

Yes, because there are never problems or conflicts of interest when things are run by the government, are there? This is a case in which markets are working, in which the threat of safety hazards or bad publicity has led producers to develop a self-imposed regulatory regime and so bear on their own, rather than passing on to the taxpayers, the costs of responding to their customers’ perceived demands. If, in the face of all of this, you think that the desire to pass this burden on to the gummint is motivated more than a whit by a selfless desire to protect the public health, then you must be … well, you must be a Times reporter who ends up carrying water for the food industry, that’s who you must be.

As my friend Tim Carney has helpfully explained in connection with the Food Safety Modernization Act being pushed by the congressional Democrats (on which see more here), what’s going on in this case is every bit the rule rather than the exception:

Big business is not only more able to bear the costs of regulation, but also better positioned to craft the regulation in beneficial ways. Kraft Foods, for instance, spent $3.68 million last year on its lobbying effort, which includes William Lesher, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Agriculture.

When the fine print is ironed and when the agencies implement the regulations, Kraft and Big Agriculture will have a say, but your local organic farmer won’t. As Stockton puts it, “There is no distinction now between industrial agriculture and federal regulatory agencies.”

For the record, my CSA sends out their spinach literally caked in mud, ensuring us that this actually makes things safer, by allowing nature’s defenses to do their work and keeping contamination from spreading. If such practices aren’t good enough for the Consumer Federation of America, that’s their problem, not mine; a quick rinse and then a dunk in cold salt water cleans those leaves off just fine. That this isn’t the result of state-enforced policy doesn’t show that these decisions are made in a “vacuum”, or that a “well-run [sic!] federal inspection system” could keep things any safer than the collective power of a highly-motivated consumer base. It’s regulation, not individual choice and corporate responsibility, that fails to be a “substitute” for the natural state that it aims to displace.

Earlier: I interviewed Tim, and a host of other luminaries, on regulatory capture and the politics of food safety in my Doublethink article on the war against unboiled milk.

Filed under: agriculture, food, government/law, libertarianism

Borlaug Birthday Linkage

Today is the 95th birthday of Norman Borlaug, the man who invented modern industrial agriculture and (some say) fed the world. Here is Ron Bailey’s post in honor of the day, which includes these striking remarks from a 2000 interview:

Even if you could use all the organic material that you have–the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues–and get them back on the soil, you couldn’t feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests.

At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows? There’s a lot of nonsense going on here.

For good measure, here and here are a couple of my earlier posts on organic crop yields and the sustainability of sustainable farming (be sure to read the comments!), and here is Kevin Carson’s take on why the official “Green Revolution” mythology is a load of bunk. Also, here is what I wrote about the subject of crop yields in my TAC piece on “culinary conservatism”:

Proponents of a new way of eating are on shakier ground when they claim that a widespread turn toward small-scale and deindustrialized agriculture would not affect crop yields. McKibben proudly cites a study in which sustainable farming methods were found to lead, on average, to a near doubling of food production per hectare. He does not mention the many cases in which results have been less impressive. A much discussed study published in the journal Science in 2002 found that switching to organic farming reduced yields by 20 percent, though the possibility of lessening our reliance on petroleum may be worth the investment of some extra land. Reincorporating into the human food chain some of the millions of acres where corn and sorghum are now grown for ethanol production would also make a great difference.

But no reasonable person wants to remake the world or do away with modern agricultural technologies all together. The best solutions will come through honest, case-by-case engagement with the subtle demands of specific situations. As the UC Berkeley agroecologist Miguel Altieri puts it, a sound approach to agriculture “does not seek to formulate solutions that will be valid for everyone but encourages people to choose the technologies best suited to the requirements of each particular situation, without imposing them.” (That this could just as well be the summary of the ideal domestic or foreign policy ought to argue in its favor.) Respect for tradition and social and ecological responsibility can work together with technological innovation and capitalist resourcefulness to respect the ridges and valleys of regionalism in an increasingly flattened world.

In any case, a very happy birthday to Dr. Borlaug, and many happy returns indeed. In my home, we will be eating free-range chicken and organic brussels sprouts in his honor.

(Cross-posted at The American Scene.)

Filed under: agriculture, food, science/tech

Food Safety and Small Farms: A Dilemma

Over the weekend, Tim Carney and Rod Dreher both had very nice columns on the controversy over the push for the implementation of a National Animal Identification System and other food safety measures being pushed in Congress that would likely pose serious burdens for smaller farmers and other producers who are unable to take advantage of the benefits of economies of scale. This is, I guess, the kind of thing that’s supposed to be right up my alley, so I suppose I ought to have something to say about it.

First, here’s Rod:

The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 attempts to streamline the unwieldy federal food regulation system, as does the similar Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act of 2009. Both, however, are written as a “one size fits all” bill that would ramp up fees and regulation on all producers of food (and, in the case of the latter, drugs and cosmetics). The little guy who sells homegrown tomatoes or homemade soap at the farmers market would be subject to the same regulation as industrial giants, without the resources to implement it.

As those familiar with my earlier writing on food safety and related subjects will be unsurprised to hear, I think this is exactly right. I’ll turn in a minute to my diagnosis of a similar sort of problem in the battle over raw milk in California, but for now here’s what Mark Thompson wrote about the regulatory dynamic in his terrific Culture11 piece on the CPSIA controversy:

The effects of these new restrictions on small and medium-sized businesses are difficult to underestimate. […] And Woldenberg, whose company is more properly classified as “medium-sized,” says that he conservatively estimates a minimum increase of 30% in the overhead for his company to manufacture an average product.  In one instance, a testing company estimated that it would cost $24,000 in testing fees for one of Learning Resource’s children’s telescopes to comply with the law — even though the product contains no parts that could conceivably be considered hazardous. Because this product only generates $32,000 in gross sales per year, it will need to be discontinued. Similar problems will exist for just about every niche children’s product, for which large production runs are impractical, such as educational materials for special needs children.

Meanwhile, however, massive multi-national corporations will be relatively well-suited to adjust to the new law. Their huge economies of scale mean they can afford to staff a few lawyers to oversee compliance with the law, and it is only a minimal change to their business models for them to mass produce and import their products in a way that minimizes testing fees. In sum, the net effects of this law are that the largest businesses will be relatively able to cope with the changes, while small and medium-sized businesses (and really, any domestic business) will be disproportionately affected.

It should go without saying that the fact that in food safety and toy safety alike it is the larger companies rather than the smaller ones that tend to be responsible for the worst crises makes this a self-defeating response indeed: the companies with the greatest intrinsic incentive to do the right thing anyway get run out of business, while those that remain are only barely compliant with the new regulations and have that much less to fear from the efforts of the competition. Hence Rod:

Ironically, the food safety problems that cause such legitimate public concern are caused by large-scale, technology-driven industrial food production and distribution methods – precisely the sort of thing that local, sustainable farmers don’t engage in. Yet they are the ones who will suffer the most from these government attempts to solve a problem caused by bigness and technology by imposing more bigness and technology.

The problem, though, is that the food safety scares of the past few years have given us every reason to think that those industrial producers simply aren’t growing and distributing food that is sufficiently clean and safe: something needs to be done, goes the standard response, and the only option available to us is this one. If saving a few small farms means allowing our food system to be overrun by bacteria-infested and otherwise potentially harmful meat and tomatoes, then that’s a choice that not many of us are willing to make.

Rod tries, though, to argue that there’s room for a third way:

We do need better food safety regulation of major producers, but local family farms and artisans shouldn’t pay for sins they didn’t commit. Consumers need to have the small-farm alternative – and if they are going to preserve it, they have to contact federal and state legislators now.

What Rod wants, then, is a system that puts stringent regulations in place on the larger producers while granting exemptions for smaller farmers who can’t reasonably be expected to meet them. But granting that this sort of route is clearly possible in principle, is it politically feasible? In my Doublethink piece on raw milk, the dynamic I detected in the battle over regulation in California was essentially the same one that Mark found in his work on the CPSIA controversy: in stark contrast to the naive image of anti-regulatory businessmen squared off against the would-be food nannies in government, the actual relationship between business and government was much more, well, symbiotic than that; it was the corporations that were pushing for the new regulations, and it was hard not to think that they were doing so at least partly because they were cognizant of the effects that such regulation would have on the competition. “Regulation”, as Tim Carney put it to me in a quotation from that article, “always helps the big guys by creating barriers to entry, but there’s a more important dynamic here: When you give the government power, you give the lobbyists power. It also works the other way: When only a handful of businesses dominate an industry, bureaucrats and politicians find it easier to control that industry.”

Which brings me to Tim’s very important column:

The lineup of backers and opponents of these [new food safety] bills has surprised some observers, but it shouldn’t. Big food processors—including the makers of some recently recalled foods—support the legislation, while leading advocates of local produce, organic food, and farmers markets are vocally resisting the measures.

Science and environment writer Steve Nash in The New Republic Monday praised Durbin’s bill as a “good idea,” and expressed surprise that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, “who many decried as corporate, conventional, and something of a shill for Big-Ag” would come out for greater federal regulation, too.

But also supporting the Durbin bill, the DeLauro bill, or both, are Kraft Foods, General Mills, Kellogs, Pepsico (maker of Frito-Lay brand snacks), the Grocery Manufacturers Association, and the National Restaurant Association.

[…] Galen Reser, vice president for government affairs at Pepsico, which processes snack food under its Frito-Lay brand, told this columnist “I think the industry is pretty comfortable with” the regulatory burden of Durbin’s bill, maintaining there are no significant “unnecessary costs.”

Big business is not only more able to bear the costs of regulation, but also better positioned to craft the regulation in beneficial ways. Kraft Foods, for instance, spent $3.68 million last year on its lobbying effort, which includes William Lesher, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Agriculture.

When the fine print is ironed and when the agencies implement the regulations, Kraft and Big Agriculture will have a say, but your local organic farmer won’t. As Stockton puts it, “There is no distinction now between industrial agriculture and federal regulatory agencies.”

And ‘round and ‘round it goes.

So look: either you support a new regulatory regime that is equally strict across the board and so will lay undue burdens on smaller producers, or you push for exemptions and likely lose the support of the big corporations that currently think the proposed regulations are just dandy. You’re damned either way, and to be perfectly honest I don’t know where I come down. I’d love it, of course, if someone could make the case that the food safety scares of recent years haven’t been so serious after all; short of that, however, it’s hard even for a near-libertarian like me not think that the implementation of even an unfairly strict set of regulations would be better than the reachable alternatives. Sadly, the possible world where we get a menu of choices less horrid than these ones is quite a long way away, and involves a political system with a very different character than ours.

Filed under: agriculture, food, government/law, libertarianism

George Will on Michael Pollan

Via Nathan, I see that George Will has written an excellent column discussing Michael Pollan’s work and the need for a better agricultural – er, food – policy than the one we’ve got now. Will’s tone is pretty dispassionate on the whole, but he does a very nice job synthesizing the different elements of Pollan’s wide-ranging arguments and making it clear why this is a cause that conservatives need to get behind. Here’s how the column concludes:

Corn, which covers 125,000 square miles of America — about the size of New Mexico — fattens 100 million beef cattle, and at least that many bipeds. Much of the river of cheap corn becomes an ocean of high-fructose corn syrup, which by 1984 was sweetening Coke and Pepsi. Disposing of the corn also requires passing it through animals’ stomachs. Corn, together with pharmaceuticals and other chemicals — a Pollan axiom: “You are what what you eat eats, too” — has made it profitable to fatten cattle on feedlots rather than grass, cutting by up to 75 percent the time from birth to slaughter. Eating corn nourished by petroleum-based fertilizers, a beef cow consumes almost a barrel of oil in its lifetime.

Vilsack’s department is entwined with the food industry that produces a food supply unhealthily simplified by the dominance of a few staples such as corn. This diet, Pollan says, has made many Americans both overfed and undernourished.

Hippocrates enjoined doctors: “Do no harm.” He also said something germane to a nation that is harming itself with its knives and forks: “Let food be thy medicine.” That should be carved in stone over the entrance to Vilsack’s very important department.

Sadly, and occasional indications to the contrary notwithstanding, it remains highly unlikely that the Vilsack-led Dept. of Ag. – and make no mistake about it; that’s exactly what it deserves to be called – will do much at all to undo the federal policies whose sorry history and devastating effects Pollan has charted so ably. It certainly can’t hurt, though, to have the case for a sane food policy being embraced by mainstream conservatives like Will, and not simply left to loons like me.

Elsewhere: Rod interviews Michael Pollan.

Filed under: agriculture, food, politics

“Growth” and “Creation”

William writes:

I’m with my dictionary on this one: grow should be transitive only in the context of hair and farm crops, e.g., “grow a beard” or “grow some corn.” And I’m a little bit iffy on the farming use. Claiming to “grow” the economy, or church membership, or a business’s profits, implies that one is claiming to be the principle of growth for that thing. In the case of facial hair, this is very nearly true, and with crops the farmer works so closely with the land that it’s a great metaphor.

But when the representatives of the government say they are “growing the economy,” such a claim isn’t just hubris. It’s simply false.

Which reminds me of a joke:

God is sitting in Heaven when a scientist says to Him, ‘Lord, we don’t need you anymore. Science has finally figured out a way to create life out of nothing. In other words, we can now do what you did in the ‘beginning’.’

‘Oh, is that so? Tell me’, replies God.

‘Well’, says the scientist, ‘we can take dirt and form it into the likeness of you and breathe life into it, thus creating man.’

‘Well, that’s interesting. Show Me.’

So the scientist bends down to the earth and starts to mold the soil.

‘Oh no, no, no…’ interrupts God,

‘Get your own damn dirt.’

Ha! I mean, where’s that scientist going to get his own dirt?! Seriously, though, this gets at the other side of the point I was after with my Wal-Mart analogy on Sunday: even in those cases where government spending does “create” jobs instead of merely displacing them (which can happen, roughly speaking, so long as the industries where government is hiring aren’t ones where there’s already sufficiently high employment), it only manages to do this by borrowing big handfuls of dirt from future generations – handfuls of dirt which, in turn, won’t be around when those future generations want to create of their own. Even in the good cases, in other words, creation looks a lot like displacement: there’s only so much dirt to go around, and only so much growth that that dirt can support.

But wait! – you say. Even on the terms of your own analogies, it’s not that simple! And of course it isn’t: just as a farmer can apply fertilizer (and a beard-grower, uhh, other stuff) to help speed the process along, so there are things that government can do to encourage things to grow more quickly and healthily than they otherwise would. Which certainly can be an appropriate response in certain situations. It does, however, suggest a challenging thought of its own: Wouldn’t it be great if many on the Left could apply to the federal government’s attempts to spur economic growth the same sort of concern for damaging side-effects that they apply to the growth-inducing methods of industrial agriculture?

P.S. And yes, Daniel, it would also be great if more conservatives would apply their concern for the side-effects of government-induced “growth” to those of the methods of industrial agriculture.

Filed under: agriculture, economics, government/law

It’s Vilsack

The subsidy-lovin’ former Iowa governor is Obama’s choice for Ag Secretary. All those who criticized me for jumping the gun in this post can now eat corn.

(H/T: David Gumpert.)

Filed under: agriculture, government/law, politics

Farming Jewishly: or, some thoughts on Burke and agriculture

by J.L. Wall

When I was in Israel last December, my trip stopped off at some sort of “Biblical-farm” thing—it set out to follow all the rules for farming and life in pre-Diaspora Judaism. An intriguing—and, in its way, quite admirable goal—but it came across as more kitschy than anything else. (That’s as delicately as I can find to put it.) So that’s the only “Jewish farm” I’ve ever actually seen or been on. But I discovered Sharon Astyk’s blog this afternoon when trying to free my mind from the tyranny of Aristotle’s students, and in a wonderful post on—what else?—Jewish farming, she wrote this lovely paragraph:

“For now, I’m recognizing that with young kids, producing a lot of our food, and writing, I can’t farm on the scale I’d like to. I’m not always sure whether it would be better for me to grow more food, to do more and talk less about it, but right now it feels more urgent to help other people get started on their journeys. But we’re still a Jewish farm. We still leave a portion of our ground fallow, still feed our animals before we feed ourselves, still glean our own garden and donate to local food pantries.”

Of course, I’ve never seen her farm, but those last few sentences made it come to life quite vividly for me. They also took me back to the day in Hebrew school when the rabbi was explaining why a particular girl’s bat mitzvah portion was actually important to Judaism. And what a tithe is (think of that—we didn’t have the slightest clue; the thought of a set amount to give was oddly alien at that point). And about why one let their land lie fallow, and didn’t pick up anything that fell to the ground. Now that I think about it, there’s an entire agricultural tradition hidden—but preserved—in several millennia of Biblical exegesis.

In my first post over here, I promised thoughts on Burke and the environment. That seems to have been an adequate introduction to these (more abbreviated than anticipated) notes.

In his Reflections, Burke defines society as, in part, “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” A social contract among generations, if you will.* Whatever one may think of it (and I’m sure we could debate its merits all day), it sets out the proposition very neatly: we are obliged to listen to and give their due those who came before us, and consider those who will come after us. Those who came before brought us, in a sense, to our present place: we stand on their achievements (and failures), just as they stood on those of the generations before them.

The second half of the proposition is a little trickier. The next generation(s) have done nothing for us yet; they will, in a sense, do nothing for us but continue the species (or the family). You can make the case for an evolutionary obligation to future generations, but I’m hard pressed (I was running a low fever earlier today, just so we’re clear on the present state of my mind) to find a contractual obligation to future generations, barring religious feeling or commandment. (I suppose one could read love—more than evolutionary—as being something beyond “reason” but not necessarily “religious”; I’ll toss that in with religious as well but use the term as shorthand for it all; if I’ve forgotten about something I shouldn’t have, please correct me—and I probably didn’t mean to seem crass if this is the case.)

Because one loves, or one is commanded, or both, the second half of the contract obtains. Contractually speaking, one could put it that the present generation acknowledges the equal humanity of future generations with the expectation that they will acknowledge the humanity of past generations. “Love,” in its way, is simply a much warmer (possibly more accurate) term for it. The present generation should strive to leave the world no worse than we found it for those who follow, and, if possible, better.

You can have a farm or an agriculture or an environmental policy that respects what we’ve been told from the past—that listens to how to grow the most at the fastest rate and the cheapest cost, but if it does not consider the state of the land for those who follow—if it leaves the land worse than we found it—it violates that generational contract which, if I may be so bold, is a secular abbreviation of a sentiment found in, but not necessarily particular to, the Judeo-Christian view of the generations.

So when Sharon’s describes her farm as Jewish, it seems true to me because the three things she lists first are not difficult technicalities, but about life. She doesn’t bring up how to harvest, or how to slaughter, or how much to charge, but how to treat them all in life. What really makes her farm Jewish, she’s saying, is love for the land, love for the animals, and love for her fellow men.

*N.B.: I’m totally ignoring the rest of Burke’s political philosophy when talking about this line; that is to say, I’m not considering any of it unless I explicitly say I am: my interest is in the line as it relates to farming and the environment, not to government and constitutions. This is also why I’m simply taking the truth of the statement for granted; religiously, it’s hard to argue against some basic truth at its core.

Filed under: agriculture, religion

President of the Corn?

Ezra Klein is disappointed to learn that the Obama transition team is reportedly considering offering the post of Agriculture Secretary to corn-loving Tom Vilsack, a possibility which Ezra pegs as evidence that Obama “will not upend the ag subsidy apple cart”.

Well, yeah – and if you expected anything else, then I’ve got a few gallons of E-85 to sell you. As has been the case in any number of other instances, the kind of “I read Michael Pollan!” talk that gets folks like Ezra and Alice Waters all excited was just that – talk – and all those who fell for it should be taking a lot more cynicism with their morning coffee.

So congratulations, America. Our long national nightmare is over, and now we’ve got a president-elect who apparently goes in for spying on his citizens, torturing his enemies, expanding the military, violating the sovereignty of our allies, threatening to attack Iran, providing effectively unconditional support to Israel, keeping massive residual forces in Iraq well beyond the date of our “withdrawal”, bailing out banks and automakers alike, massively shrinking the tax base while increasing federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, and now sticking with the kinds of agricultural policies that degrade the environment, encourage bad eating habits, and contribute to the global hunger crisis. But don’t worry – I hear he’s a sharp guy with a really calm temperament, which of course is all that really matters. Here’s to change we can believe in!

(Image via Flickrer jimmedia.)

Filed under: agriculture, food, government/law

Cheap Food Isn’t Cheap.

Ezra Klein has a great post on the role of stupid government subsidies in making bad food look cheaper than it really is. You should read it. His conclusion:

It’s possible, of course, that if you removed those enabling factors, the resulting equilibrium would be far from a utopia. But at least it would be honest, and we could see the economics of the situation for what they really are, and decide how to proceed on that basis. As it is, reformers must fight against not only the actual efficiencies of the system, but the perceived low cost of the product, which is really a product of government policy.

Right. And to the extent that this is one of those times when liberals, libertarians, and non-corrupted conservatives can get together on an issue that’s really fundamental to the health – by which I don’t mean “health” in the narrow sense alone – of our nation, that will be a great thing. It’s going to take everyone, of course, since the interests behind the status quo are rich and unduly powerful. And so despite my reluctance to replace the current system of subsidies with one that subsidizes different things instead (that worked out so well for us last time, you know?), I’ll insist again that this is a clear case where building some trans-ideological bridges is in everyone’s best interest.

Filed under: agriculture, conservatism, food, government/law, libertarianism