Nope. One of my tenant farmers for my little plot farms thousands of acres with his family. One day we were out looking at some land and earlier in the day he heard a rumor about the subsidies being cut and he went on a rant. The man has never voted D in his life but he was all for cutting the Iraq war completely so the government could spend the money on farmers. So I concluded that subsidy means alot to his operation.
“The man has never voted D in his life but he was all for cutting the Iraq war completely so the government could spend the money on farmers”
Can we cut Iraq funding completely so the government can allow the money to go where it otherwise would have gone. Those people can then spend it as they so choose, on homegrown food or otherwise, and farmers can live and die on the market like every other unspecial industry.
“So I concluded that subsidy means alot to his operation.”
By which I infer the argument is that subsidies are somehow especially important to farmers, since we don’t extend the same courtesy to all other industries. So, no, the argument isn’t anything other than “Farmers are special.”
Do they realize, I wonder, how lucky they are that at one point they controlled an important voting block, happened to be an important component of the populist and progressive movements which led directly to the New Deal, and managed to get their subsidies set in stone during the crisis of the Great Depression? Gosh, how lucky. So we screw bondholders to fund auto unions, fight wars for oil, and bless steel as necessary for national defense. But no industry is so tucked in at the teet of government as farming, and all because a century or so ago they were in the right placer at the right time.
Oh, also because in the general public’s mind tyhey’re still Ma and Pa pulling wooden plows behind oxen on the prairie, fighting cattle barons and Pinkerton agents, or whatever.