Posted on 01/28/2026 6:05:31 AM PST by Heartlander
America loves to debate socialism. We argue about universal healthcare, guaranteed income, student loan forgiveness, and government dependency. We pride ourselves on our rugged independence and belief in free markets. We warn that socialism destroys innovation, freedom, and personal responsibility. But here’s the uncomfortable truth most Americans never stop to consider: the most centrally planned, government-dependent, subsidy-driven system in the United States isn’t medicine, housing, or energy—it’s food.
Our food system is not a free market. It is not capitalism in any recognizable form. It is a government-engineered economy propped up by taxpayer dollars at every stage, directed by regulation, shaped by corporate interests, and leaving both consumers and farmers dependent, unhealthy, and without real alternatives.
Each year, more than $40 billion of taxpayer money is used to subsidize commodity crops like corn, soy, wheat, and cotton. Crop insurance—also paid for largely by the public—is essentially another subsidy, and without it, most large commodity farms wouldn’t survive. But the subsidies don’t stop at growing. Once harvested, those subsidized crops become corn syrup, seed oils, stabilizers, livestock feed, artificial ingredients, ultraprocessed food additives, and ethanol—fuel grown on prime farmland and heavily subsidized again under the banner of environmental benefit.
Then the same Farm Bill that subsidizes growing and processing also subsidizes purchasing those foods through SNAP benefits. And when the predictable metabolic outcomes emerge—obesity, diabetes, fatty liver disease, autoimmune disorders—the government subsidizes the healthcare required to manage the consequences. So the loop looks like this: we subsidize growing the ingredients. We subsidize the industry turning those ingredients into processed food. We subsidize the public buying those products. And then we subsidize the medical care required to treat the disease that food causes. That isn’t a food economy. It is a taxpayer-funded dependency system.
People like to imagine that subsidies make farming cushy. Nothing could be further from reality. Even with subsidies, 85 percent of US farmers work a second job just to stay on their land and feed their families. They are subsidizing the food system with unpaid labor simply to keep feeding the country. I once watched a dairy farmer who had just won the lottery. When asked what he planned to do with the money, he shrugged and said, “I’ll keep farming until it runs out.”
He wasn’t joking—he was describing reality. Ask a farmer where they see themselves in five years and many go silent. Some get emotional. Some laugh because it’s safer than crying. I know that feeling: the pit in your stomach, the exhaustion, the prayer for a path forward.
What we have is not capitalism. It is a hybrid of state control and corporate power—uncomfortably close to agricultural indentured servitude for the very people who feed the country.
And the regulations farmers face are not about safety—they are about control. To legally sell raw milk in Texas, I need a raw milk permit, a government-approved facility, a mop sink, a floor sink, a dishwashing sink, a handwashing sink, an employee restroom, specific ceiling materials, and multiple pages of compliance requirements. In Idaho, to legally sell raw milk, you need a business license. Same country. Same product. Same cows. In California, raw milk regulations are so extreme that only one company in the entire state can meet them.
When I lived in Ventura County and asked about applying for a dairy permit—not even raw milk, just a legal dairy—the official told me, “There isn’t a single dairy left in this county. The regulations are too much. We don’t recommend you apply.” The department responsible for food production was actively discouraging food production.
Some people say, “Regulations should protect health, not eliminate competition.” But the government’s job was never to protect our health, and it certainly isn’t protecting it now. If health were the priority, soda wouldn’t be cheaper than water. Ingredients banned in other countries wouldn’t appear in US baby food. Seed oils wouldn’t be unavoidable. And products engineered for addiction wouldn’t be placed directly into school cafeterias and federally funded food programs. This has never been about safety—it has always been about protecting industrial systems and the corporate interests behind them.
Meanwhile, the public is not thriving. We are overfed and undernourished, surrounded by food yet biologically starving for nutrients. We solved hunger by creating a new kind of starvation—one hidden inside colorful packaging and subsidized pricing. And while we celebrate cheap food as if it’s proof the system works, we’ve lost 170,000 farms in just eight years.
So what is the path forward? It’s not bigger government, not more regulation, and not another layer of bureaucracy. The solution is choice, access, and freedom. We need regional processing, on-farm legal processing, reduced permitting, consumer willingness to support real farms, and knowledge passed farmer to farmer—not mandated, standardized, or enforced from a federal desk. Agriculture was never meant to be uniform. Different soils, climates, cultures, and regions require different approaches. We need fewer barriers, not more. And we need systems built for resilience and nourishment, not efficiency and control.
We can call this system whatever we want—capitalism, socialism, or something in between—but if a nation cannot freely feed itself, it isn’t free.
Republished from Epoch Times
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Author is hella woke. In a good way. The best way.
Same general idea applies to big pharma. If looking out for the health of Americans was truly our government’s priority, these giant pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t be allowed to spend all that money advertising their “products” on TV as if they’re selling food, which is so insane that almost no other country in the world allows it to take place.
The author cites state level, not national/federal, regulations, but then proceeds to bash the federal government for them. The heavy overregulation in California and Texas are sharply contrasted with minimal rules in Idaho.
This part of his comments aren’t relevent to federal government.
Now, the subsidies are, and the dependency of some farmers - mainly the giant corporate ones- and some politicians on the federal gov through the the various food subsidy programs and lunch programs [like the fraudulent Feeding Our Families case that milked the treasury]
Author is software. It’s fully AI generated text.
From what my wife tells me, to get around all the regs in Texas for raw milk, you buy a fractional interest in the cow.
In a good year, we can grow more than we can use.
In a bad year, farms can go out of business quickly.
Big Ag and Crony Goobermint have had their hands on the scales for so long, hard top tell what’s real.
Consolidation makes the Grift problem really yuuuge.
Food Pyramid scam finally exposed and reversed.
I’mn not an Ag Economist so I have no solution.
But, ensuring plentiful, healthy, safe food is a national interest.
And the regulations farmers face are not about safety
Today the chemical application rate is determined by the warranty. Fertilizer rates by the coop recommendation for max yield which is seldom achieved. Application of chemicals is by a lot of govt regulation. Seed choices by the seed dealers.
Toward last, cost per acre was pretty much the same, they were all doing the same thing.
I used to see farmers manage for their particular situation. They made $50 to $100 or profit per acre based on the mgt skills (decisions made).
We used to have a 3 year grain reserve for food security, now if the last bushel of old crop isn’t used the day the new crop came in, someone screwed up.
Subsidized crop insurance was the solution as lobbied by the insurance industry. That took the risk out of farming so profit of less than $10 with little risk worked for the big farmers.
But the good news is food is abundant. Few are really starving. We still have choices on the food we eat. We complain with our mouths full.
Agriculture like auto manufactures, govt, etc tends to consolidate. This is has been proven throughout history.
When the big boys do themselves in, and it does happen, then the entrepreneurship kicks in. So the only recommendation I can make is use the market place to influence the food production process. But that will inconvenience you.
Oh, well, it’s good to know AI lived in Ventura County.
socialism exists because it is hidden under a capitalist system that pays for it. Once it is given you will never be able to take it back
The farmers aren’t making money. The ranchers aren’t making money. Yet food prices are still too high-especially beef. Blame the meat and grain oligopolies.
The linked article gets it backwards right at the start.
The big commodity farms don’t need government protection or support. They can afford unsubsidized insurance or to self insure. Their biggest problem is access to foreign markets. U.S. agriculture is a major exporter. It needs government to defend market access against foreign protectionism and mercantilism. Farmers are making planting decsions for the Spring now. The trade war and tariff gyrations introduce a massive dose of political risk, and that is destructive to anyone in a competitive market.
But domestically, crop acreage limits (an artifact of FDR’s New Deal fascism and now long gone), direct price supports (also long gone), and today’s federal crop insurance have always been designed to support small farmers.
About 150,000 large farms, most still family owned, now produce over three quarters of America’s food, fuel (regarding ethanol, not oil), and fiber production. The big guys don’t need government support, apart from international trade issues.
USDA farm programs have always been designed to help the small farmers, the guys farming 200 acres on the weekends with third hand equipment. And the primary government support today is subsidized crop insurance. The big guys don’t need it. The little guys are already marginal and do need a safety net or they’ll all be gone quickly.
Do we want to support small farms or not? The libertarians say no, but the price of that is the continuing withering of rural communities as the big guys buy out the little guys and land ownership gets concentrated in the hands of a Junker class. And it’s not just the farms; it’s the loss of small town services, retail,hospitals and
schools as rural communities hollow out. We have northern plains counties that have been losing population for 60 years due to farm consolidation. That’s what worries farm belt congressmen.
If we accept subsidized crop insurance to help the little guys, the question then becomes whether we should means test eligibility. But do we really want a farm policy that deliberately subsidizes infficient producers while penalizing our most efficient, innovative and savvy farmers? Well, no. Crop insurance is available to all producers on an equal basis. But that means the big farmers will receive the bulk of the subsidy even in a program designed to help small producers.
Dilemmas are real.
We subsidize some crops in another way - our foreign aid programs where we buy grain crops and ship them out as foreign aid to 3rd world countries. It subsidizes excess crop production for crop levels exceeding the needs of our people and exceeding the for-profit export needs as well. But, when GWBush tried to cut that subsidy down, he got push back from the big Catholic and other Church charities that are the 3rd parties in the foreign-food aid network, as those Charities get 25cents of every dollar of that aid, making it a big piece of their income. The other push back came from the entire network of shipping outfits that get the crops from farmland to our seaports and from our seaports to the foreign countries - it’s big business for them. Everyone on the excess crop gravy train forced GWBush to back down.
Remember the 1930s. The cheapest food was STEAK! It was so cheap FDR decided to get the price up by buying millions of cattle and hogs, shooting and burying them. Not give it to the starving poor in the depression. Almost all had to be buried.
And the starving poor with no jobs now could not afford that higher priced meat.
Ten years later, those same agri agents who had shot the cattle and hogs were begging farmers and ranchers to INCREASE meat production for the war effort.
Born in 1954, I was raised on a tenant farm. During my first 12 years, besides growing corn, oats, soybeans, and hay, we had beef cows, hogs, chickens, and a couple of freeloaders (horses) that on rare ocassions helped move cattle. The hogs and chickens would become less and less part of the operation through the years.
I saw and became useful at all of the farm chores (finally driving tractors, unsupervised, in the field at age 7). At 21 I became a business partner in the farm, when my parents and I bought a farm on contract. Four years later I painfully became aware of the redistribution of wealth tactic, which was not new, but this time happened under the globalist tool, Jimmah Cawtuh.
But it is the chemical and bioengineering industries that have done far more harm than good. I utterly dreaded the application of pesticides (mostly herbicides, but ocassionally insecticides).
I said farewell to modern farming as bioengineered seeds became the norm. I don’t miss it. I even help a farmer part-time, but don’t envy him and his 6k+ acre operation at all.
**The big commodity farms don’t need government protection or support.**
If you are talking about big operations that own most, if not all, of the acres that they farm, then yes, they shouldn’t need any protection from big guvmint.
But the big farm operations, that are primarily cash rented acres, have a very small margin of profit. It doesn’t take much of a downswing in income to put them in enormous debt.
My old buddy, now deceased, grew up on a farm in rural Alabama. 12 siblings. Born around 1940. All of them had terrible sores and boils , he blamed it on the “Cotton Poison”
I don’t know.
Made moonshine for extra cash...
Short story: Electricity didn’t come to this poor community till 1950 or so. When they ran the lines, there were no licensed electricians. Neighbor stopped by. Said he would wire the house for them.
Shortly thereafter house burned down. Along with most of their food they had put up.
He said “we lived on grass till next season. Momma could make even grass taste good”
Toughest people I’ve ever known.
“Crop insurance is available to all producers on an equal basis.”
What if crop insurance rates went down with acreage? I am assuming that the same rates currently apply for 100,000 acres as for 1,000 acres.
Well, I farmed for a year and grew a crop of corn
That stretched as far as the eye can see
That’s a whole lot of cornflakes,
Near enough to feed New York till 1973
Cultivation is my station and the nation
Buys my corn from me immediately
And holding sixty thousand bucks, I watch as dumper trucks
Tip New York’s corn flakes in the sea
The Who - Now I’m A Farmer
Yep, survival sometimes requires extreme measures.
As a boy, I would do as my dad, when walking along a fence row or hayfield, pulling foxtail grass and chewing on the stem.
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