It'd be nice if the government just stayed out of all this so that people could decide for themselves what food they wanted to support. Right now the real costs are all hidden and incentives directed in all the wrong ways. The food that is cheap isn't actually cheap it just looks that way because the price signal has been so badly distorted.
I don't want a "smarter" farm policy. I'd like no farm policy. It's clear that both parties don't actually care about this issue besides making sure that agribusiness is happy.
Imagine having no Farm Policy and we end up having food shortages, there would be a revolution.
I can imagine. After all, this country has no Plate Policy, and I routinely end up eating off the floor. And I really wish we had a Consumer Electronics and Computers policy; I'm really jealous of the country that produced the iPhone and the Macbook because of those attributes.
Fortunately, the country I live in does have a Real Estate Policy and a Banking System policy, and they're willing to put my money where their mouths are! It's working out about as well as one would expect.
Pure capitalist libertarianism like that works really well if you live in a society willing to stand back and let people die as a result of different decisions or even circumstances outside their control.
History has shown that's not really the society that civilized humans want to live in.
Pure capitalist libertarianism is a society where government is willing to stand back and let people die. Not society. There's a difference.
In time of trouble, you can turn for help to family, friends, neighbors, private charity, or government. In roughly descending order of efficiency and humanity.
Including government at the end of that chain is a noble attempt to make sure no one falls through the cracks--like the federal reserve as a "lender of last resort". The problem is that, like the federal reserve, the guarantee at the end of the chain changes the dynamics at the front.
We respond to a government guarantee to care for the old and infirm by not doing it ourselves. Why plan to care for your mother when the government will do it? Why support private orphanages when you pay taxes to support institutionalizing them?
The result is emaciated expectations of family, friends and neighbors, and sickly private charity. Government may be inefficient and inhumane, but it's cheap--spending someone else's money--and it's guaranteed. So it dominates the space. And when the other options die away through disuse, it looks like there are no other options. And all that's left is dependence on the state.
The idea that it's government care or no care is an illusion created by a couple generations of government dependence. I am convinced that our way -- institutions, beaurocrats -- is really the inhumane way to care for the poor. I want to get rid of it, not because I don't care, but because I do.
I like this concept, I really do, but I'm wondering if it's a sort of idealized utopia. Are there any societies that take care of their most desperate members without that being a government function?
Almost all of the industrialized nation have some sort of safety net and/or universal health care. On the other side of the spectrum you get countries like Somalia, where they, you know, do let people die.
I don't honestly know the proper role for government in charity. I reject it rhetorically to illustrate that rejection of government charity is not rejection of charity overall, but I do not know if the extreme case is practical. You do seem to be right that it is not practiced.
I had thought I would find counterexamples in places like the Antebellum south, or ancient Rome, and while I found a reduced emphasis on the state, I did not find it completely gone. And while my off the cuff memory is that there are places in the world, even today, where the obligation for children to care for their parents in old age is so complete that people have children for that very purpose, I don't have a citation for it. And I really don't have the experience to know whether it's preferable.
On a personal level, I see very vividly the evils of institution and bureaucracy: the people it misses, the way it mistreats even the people it helps. I have helped homeless friends with transitions from shelter to shelter, even opened my home to them when it was appropriate; I don't think highly of the treatment they get, well out of the public eye. And I'm pretty sure if the city hadn't been there as an option, I'd have done more, and they'd have been better off. Is it good the city was there? I guess. But I hate the false dilemma that says it is the only way, and my instinct is that family, friends, and community are far better.
I do not know what the correct role is for the state, but I cannot but hate anything that weakens the responsibility of a man to care for himself, or that seeks to replace the hospitality that family, friends and neighbors owe to each other.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. A lot of people don't seem to like to look to other countries as examples of how individuals, societies, and governments can interact. Either as examples or as counter-examples.
NPR's excellent Planet Money podcast did a few shows on Denmark, which is like an economic bizarro-world. Employment law is such that it's really easy to fire people, but they have a very strong social safety net (2 years unemployment, or something like that) so the workforce is very fluid. Employers aren't as afraid to hire people (as they are in countries with strong labor laws like France) because they don't have the same fear of legal or interpersonal repercussions. Firing in Denmark is no big deal.
Taxes are progressive, crazy high, support fully subsidized health care, and the people there are the happiest in the world.
Note: I'm not trying to say every country should be just like Denmark, but just that the way we've always done things isn't the only way that can work.
On the other hand, you see people who complain about how "government can't do anything right" and "all regulation is bad" yet they don't realize the only reason that their houses survive earthquakes without killing them is that their houses comply with government designed and enforced building codes. There's a reason the Haitian earthquake killed more people than stronger earthquakes in other places. Haiti has had "limited government" for decades.
It's easy to paint limited government as a moral ideal, and it's easy to find prominent examples of government failures. I personally hate bureaucracy as much as anyone else. The fact remains that a lot of people (often quietly) get meaningful help from our overall society via democratically elected governments.
This has been a really interesting back and forth, just a quick point:
> There's a reason the Haitian earthquake killed more people than stronger earthquakes in other places. Haiti has had "limited government" for decades.
That's actually false. Haiti ranks as the 141st economically free country in the world out of around 200, and 24th out of 29 in the Caribbean. Government spending is around 20% of GDP, the income tax rates are comparable to the USA, but the property tax rate is sky high - up to as much as 15%. So no, Haiti hasn't had "limited government" the way Singapore or Hong Kong has limited government. They've got quite a bit of government going on, it just happens to both inept and corrupt.
The earthquake in Haiti was so destructive, in general, because Haiti has been a land under the heel of grinding poverty for many years. It was the poorest country in the western hemisphere, a place where children were sold into slavery to make ends meet, where eating dirt to avoid hunger pains was a practical enough approach to spawn an industry. And then natural disaster hit.
Building codes have got nothing to do with it. My sister went there a few weeks ago. I've seen pictures. Some of those houses look to me like they'd fall over in a stiff rainstorm.
[Edit: The hospital my sister helped build is the subject of the video featured on this page: http://heartlineministries.org/EarthquakeNeeds.aspx . If you haven't seen Haiti, it's worth looking at the community they served and the problems they solved.]
Or it might be possible to somehow have a government of the people. Not a separate bolt-on installation consisting of some type of aliens not in any way related to people with whom it constantly wars.
I would just take the grand-parent post as a satire of the grand-grand-parent post about the need for a farm policy.
There are good arguments for having some services provided by the state (though we may argue whether they are good enough arguments). I did not take the grand parent as making the argument that everything the state does is evil.
It might not be the world we want to live in, but that's life. Natural selection is the name of the game.
It baffles me that people think social development can be somehow exempted from evolutionary processes. Call it callous or compassionless, if you want, but there will always be less fit members of a species/society. Humans didn't get to this spot on the food chain by subsidizing failure. If we want to increase prosperity, we should stop encouraging the propagation of actions/ideas/genes that would otherwise be unsustainable without throwing short-sighted policy and/or tax money at it.
Heh, I'm not suggesting institutional anything. Precisely the opposite. I'm saying that in the bigger picture, welfare and subsidies and coercive interference in general hurt more than they help. E.g., aid to North Korea might keep impoverished North Koreans alive longer, but it will do nothing for their long term prosperity. It just gives them a chance to give birth to more impoverished North Koreans. Farm subsidies, etc, are arrogant, over-simplistic meddling with extremely complex natural systems that will have -- as the article in question was pointing out -- any number of unpredictable consequences.
I just don't buy the idea that the short-sighted whims of politics can make the world a better place.
[edit: adding for clarity: "stop encouraging" DOES NOT translate as "start discouraging"]
Ok, there might be no "Plate Policy", but there are FDA rules that say your plate must be clean when you eat at a restaurant and that the plates you eat from at home (surely imported from China) can't have poisonous heavy metals in them.
Prices are information. The best guarantee that we don't have food shortages is to use prices to communicate our desire for food, and insurance to guarantee it. That should both encourage food production and inventive ways of securing that production (e.g. diversification in crop, geography, diversity, etc.).
But policies do not communicate information very well. They don't respond as fast as markets do, to changes in demand or supply. They are liable to political interference, as different sectors of the economy capture policy-making bodies and extract rents: the people who know most about an industry come from the industry, so there tends to be a two-way door between policy-makers and the industry, warping incentives.
So I would argue that to secure more certainty for food supplies, we would be better off looking at insurance-based mechanisms, rather than direct government involvement in food production, subsidization, etc.
The problem with the food supply is that there is a long funnel that the demand feedback has to go in order to change it.
If your community suddenly realizes it needs more food, there is no way that the food can come to existence in days or even weeks. To some degree, other communities will be more willing to sell more of their food surplus to you if prices go up (after of days or weeks of delay to have the whole thing sorted out), and that would pick up some of the slack. But in the short and middle term, what will happen is that the poor will simply get priced out of the market.
An intelligent policy would be to provide a food buffer, a margin of safety, that gives the price signal enough time to travel through the markets. In this case, you get the benefits of a free market, but prevent the worst side effects of it.
And this is why futures markets make sense. If a (food) insurance seller wants to hedge their risk, they could purchase futures, driving up the price of those futures; and a way to arbitrage an increase in price between today's price and a future price is to store it (i.e. your buffer). For example, the first forward contracts on the Chicago Board of Trade, the oldest futures exchange, were food contracts. But none of these mechanisms have a necessary requirement for governmental policy intervention, save perhaps collective purchasing of insurance.
Thank you, barrkel. I have been thinking hard at your response, and I don't think I can offer a complete comment on it. I think these market mechanisms solve part of the problem, and at least do better than the current policies of USDA. However, your proposal is far from perfect and has it's own set of problems. For one, your average granny on social security is unlikely to buy any futures; and the people who does is likely to come and profiteer on her. Still, that is better than starving to death.
I have read Pollan's Omnivore Dilemma, and found his description of New Deal agriculture policies very interesting. I encourage you to have a look and compare those with the ones in effect today.
I think it could be argued that for certain classes of good, efficient markets can be a net detriment to all involved. In the case of agriculture, the inefficiency created by government interference and planning helps flatten fluctuations in staple production, meaning that fewer people move into non-potable cash crops and the market as a whole is better served because people don't starve.
> Imagine having no Farm Policy and we end up having food shortages
There is little doubt that agricultural policy in the west is all about protecting a specific industry from the realities of globalization and not about securing the food supply.
Being a small country, not having a farm policy and also going to war with your neighbors might lead to food shortages. The agricultural policies of the EU and USA do way, way more harm than good.
Indeed - they're a major contributory factor to poverty in the third world, along with aid. Yes, aid causes poverty: it warps economies and cultures them to be dependent on outside help; food aid depresses local food prices, drives farmers out of business, etc.
"The policy have now is problematic, therefore we shouldn't have any policy". This is a non sequitur, but it's common fair in the libertarian world view.
Yes, that is a non sequitur, fortunately that is not what those proposing we abolish the farm policy are saying (at least not the thoughtful ones.)
They are rather laying out problems with any farm policy. Any farm policy will distort the economics of food production. Any farm policy will influence individual consumers choices in a non-market-based manner. Any farm policy will have international implications, and any farm policy that looks anything remotely like ours at all will harm less developed countries.
I personally am inclined to think we should have a farm policy. If we are going to have an intelligent discussion about it, we should start by acknowleding that those that disagree with us might have valid points that are at least worth considering.
Really trying to understand the viewpoint of someone you disagree with is far more productive than tilting at strawmen.
"Any farm policy will distort the economics of food production."
What is "The economics"? This is the next common fallacy on the libertarian side. That there is some sort of law of physics that represents "The economy" and that any regulation interferes with this one true law of God.
There is no such thing as "The economics" or "The one true market". There are many markets, and all of them are based on arbitrary rules with trade offs.
Very apropos. Many of the worst effects of the Irish famine of 1846 can be attributed to British farm policy, such as an unwillingness to block the export of grain from Ireland after the famine started.
Also see the repeal of the Corn Laws, and (unrelated) the earlier improvement of farming methods that lead to the industrial revolution and who did the improving.
We need to stop letting Iowa vote early in the primaries. So much of what's wrong with subsidies stem from the retarded level of influence that Iowa has in presidential politics.
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"He so retarded wit it!"
"Them shoes is retarded!"
In an ideal world I'd like no farm policy as well, but all western countries are democracies today, and all democracies respond to special interests. This is the democrat's (small "d") dilema.
Everywhere else is some flavor of dictatorship, and they have farm policies too.
(This was just a lame attempt to explain reality.)
Given the amount of money that the agricultural corporations would be happy to throw in, and the public's demonstrated weakness for propaganda and inability to actually decide anything for themselves, I don't have much confidence in people coming to a reasonable, considered conclusion.
Fidel Castro brought Cuba back from the brink of starvation precisely with a "smarter" farm policy. For decades Cuba relied on Green Revolution techniques that required huge petroleum inputs. When the SU collapsed, Cuba lost its main source of oil. Castro's plan was to encourage local, organic farming techniques including urban agriculture. The result is that not only are Cubans not starving, they are eating healthier than Americans.
For what I have read, Cubans brought Cuba back from the brink of starvation. The main merit of Fidel was turning his eye to the other side when people began to break the official policies and do what needed to be done in order to keep themselves fed.
I don't want a "smarter" farm policy. I'd like no farm policy. It's clear that both parties don't actually care about this issue besides making sure that agribusiness is happy.