Get Government Out of the Food Industry

Farming is an important facet of our economy. We support farmers because they produce our food and with the rise of globalization, are threatened with cheaper, foreign food sources that are being shipped into the country.

The "eat local" movement lives in this debate. Local food sources keep us fed and keeps our farmers in profit with a special emphasis on sustainability, something I believe is paramount when it comes to food.

The worst thing for farmer John down the road is that the U.S. government believes it can do the job better than he can.

Through subsidies, quotas and payouts, our government has manipulated the food industry and caused unnecessary harm to those it is intending to help, both farmers and consumers.

From 1999 to 2005, the USDA paid over $1 billion in farm payments in the names of 172,000 deceased individuals. Forty percent went to those who had been dead for three or more years and 19 percent to those dead for seven or more years.

The trend continues today.

This blatant waste in the system should anger all of us because we all pay taxes and we all eat food. The problem with repealing the waste is that it doesn't affect one single person enough to cause real injury; we each pay a little bit in taxes that don't bother us too much individually but added up and paid out to a dead farmer, it amounts to a whole lot of waste, sponsored by the U.S. government.

How can we let $1 billion of tax money slip through the cracks on what seems to be an institutional inefficiency in the program? To find the answer, one need not look further than the agricultural section of the U.S. Code. 1,800 pages of laws and regulations on agriculture make the system convoluted and inefficient. Don't be surprised if you hear the same excuse from officials in the Dept. of Agriculture, they'll admit that the system is too big to catch all the waste; all the more reason to cut it out all together.

Most crops are not subsidized, yet we do not see shortages of fruits, vegetables or livestock. Why are we subsidizing wheat, cotton, corn, soybeans and rice? What makes these crops different? Is it because they can be used to make fuel as well?

Yes; government infers that since these crops can be used as input goods instead of solely as food output, they are more susceptible to sudden changes in price and thus must be regulated/subsidized/controlled. This is a rational inference because crops like wheat  have greatly inelastic demand (small changes in quantity affect large changes in price) and this can mean uncertainty for farmers. Sadly, when government tries to correct this, drastic and unintended consequences ensue.

In the 1930s this fallacious reasoning reared its ugly head while our country was on the heels of the dust bowl.

President Franklin Roosevelt's Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) in 1938 set quotas on the nation's supply of wheat in order to stabilize prices and protect the purchasing power of farmers.

Each farmer was only allowed to devote a certain acreage for wheat cultivation so that the crop that each sold could bring in more profit, benefiting from reduced supply. Sounds like a great idea, doesn't it?

The food supply can be subject to volatile changes from small price changes, as it was during the aftermath of the Great Depression. Conventional wisdom suggests that farmers should be protected because they lend themselves to such high risk work and if a shortage did occur, we would all suffer. Unfortunately, the plan didn't quite work that way. Most farmers did not follow the government's decrees and attempted to grow more on their wheat patch than was allowed, pumping the soil full of fertilizer and pillaging it of its nutrients for a denser crop.

This resulted in a minor reduction in the supply of wheat and ruined soil all over the nation. 

We need to be wary of government's attempts to regulate the way our farmers grow food in America.

These programs have unintended consequences that can be as far reaching as the neighborhood grocery store. Can we trust bureaucrats in Washington to know the land and crops better than our nation's farmers?

Americans cannot afford rising food prices purely for the government's compassionate yet ill-fated intentions. Risk is inherent in any economic venture and it is those that fail in the market that teach the others to survive.

The average farmer earns much more than the average American anyway, so farm subsidy programs end up as welfare for the wealthy. It is time to get the government out of the food industry, before we all go hungry.