Posted on 02/15/2002 2:58:58 PM PST by RJCogburn
Farmers: Get a Job!
It kind of makes me wonder what country I'm living in when I pick up the newspaper and read this from the Associated Press:
"With crop prices mired near record lows, the government says farm earnings will drop 20 percent this year unless Congress enacts a new farm program or approves more emergency payments."
Hello? Is this free enterprise, profit-and-loss America, or have I crossed over into the Twilight Zone: Welcome to Cuba?
Before we dissect this "news," let's step back and appreciate the big picture. For many years the environmental movement has been warning that the out-of-control human race will imminently starve itself to death because of the Malthusian notion that population growth will outstrip food production.
Well, it hasn't quite worked that way. Instead of starving people and wealthy farmers (which is what should have happened if the doomsayers were right), we have fat people (see the recent Surgeon General's report) and farmers bellyaching about low crop prices.
The bad news, then, is good.
Getting back to the AP story: I'm a magazine editor, and I have yet to read in the newspaper that "editors' earnings will drop 20 percent this year unless Congress enacts a new editor program or approves more emergency payments." Do you know what I and my fellow editors have to do if our earnings drop to a level too low to live on? We have to look for higher-paying jobs! I assume that mechanics and real-estate salesman have to do the same.
But not the farmers. They have apparently been bestowed with the Divine Right to Farm. If they can't make enough to live on, they have the legal power to loot the rest of us so they can stay on the farm anyway. This sounds like insanity. Would someone please explain it to me?
Maybe the yeoman farmer, the noble man of the soil, is too busy lobbying for taxpayer subsidies to learn a little economics. But when a line of work won't pay a satisfactory income, it is the market's way of saying we have enough people doing that; go find something else to do. Why should farmers be an exception to a perfectly good rule?
An economist at Texas A&M was quoted saying, "Congress is looking at these numbers and saying, 'We can't live with that.'" Hah! He means that members of Congress won't let us taxpayers live with that, since they aren't planning to subsidize the farmers out of their own pockets. I can live with it, thank you. Besides, I gave last year, and the year before. I'm thinking it's time for the farmers to stand on their own two feet.
Do you realize that 30 percent of the wheat farmers' gross income comes from the government? Thirty percent! The guys that grow other grains and soybeans get 20 percent of their income from Washington. Can you say "socialized agriculture"?
I know how the farmers would respond. They need special treatment because they have to contend with the weather and price fluctuations. Like that's something new. Farmers have been plagued by drought, floods, and pests since biblical times. Uncertain prices are just as old. Guess what: the free market long ago evolved ways for farmers to transfer the risks to people willing to accept them in return for the prospect of high profits. They're called insurance and futures markets. The government has screwed up crop insurance because it thinks it can handle it better than private companies. The futures markets still work. The principle is simple. A farmer doesn't know what the price of his crop will be when he plants it. But there have always been risk-takers who are willing to bet that the price will be even higher than the farmer is happy to accept. So the risk-taker promises to buy the crop from the farmer at an agreed-on price. That gives the farmer a guarantee against a lower price and the risk-taker the chance for a real killing. Everyone is happy.
In other words, farmers don't warrant special treatment. Capitalist technological advances have made it possible to grow more food on less land and with fewer farmers. Why don't we face it already?
Give My Best to your Dad. It is a very tough job. The title yanked my chain also.
they'll figure it out when development and environmentalism deplete american agriculture. then we'll depend on imports and international agribusiness.
then they'll be whining for the good ol' days.
No, you can't buy beer, only rent beer.
Decades of socialists.
"It sure does not sound like conservativism."
It isn't.
"Total government control over our food supply (farmers)....we need to change this...but where to start???"
Where we don't start is by leaving 99% of the game rigged, then pulling the lifeline out of the farmers and telling 'em "now sink or swim!" in our best Josef Stalin voice.
You get no argument from me on that.
Kind of like people on welfare (at taxpayer expense) is not exactly a comforting thought.
No, we're not "in danger" of giving it up, we're in the process of giving it up. When even self-proclaimed "conservatives" rail against domestic agriculture, and wax eloquent in their advocacy of policies of dependence on our enemies for the food we put in our mouths, the game is over, folks. It's just a question of how long we can keep coasting before we're all forced to confront the brutal reality.
200+ years, we'll, I guess it was better than nothing.
I don't think anyone ever bailed hay
Sailors bail water
Farmers bale hay
That is starting to change, there are stories out there exposing that the envirowacko movement is not what it has been portrayed to be. It is up to us to keep the pressure on, by posting every article that exposes enviro-lies everywhere we can on the internet, calling talk radio about them, and making sure are elected officials at all levels are aware of them.
I'm Jealous!
I'm Jealous!
That being said, farming is one of the noble occupations that a nation needs to perpetuate to keep it's self identity.
If a historian goes back and tries to decide at which point the noble Roman Republic began it's decline, he will find that the decline began when the independent small farmers were wiped out during the Punic Wars. The widows of the citizen farmer soldiers could not meet the debt on the farms. Roman farms became "latifundias", large farms owned by the rich (read corporations). The bedrock of the Roman Republic was thus destroyed.
The U.S. subsidizes firms that build submarines and military aircraft because they are vital to the health of our nation.
So should it be with the independent farmer.
Although I have always lived in a city, my fiancee who's a web designer was raised in the country and lives in a place that used to be a farm! However, he thinks all farmers are rich! Which is ridiculous...grumble grumble grumble.
I grew up in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. There were orange groves that smelled great, there were even small farms near where I lived.
All paved over, for what reason? There were even horses there in the 70's.
All gone. All paved over. All concrete now. All ugly and smog now and illegal immigrants. I guess that's why I support farming totally completely. In fact, I would take it further, I would probably outlaw selling any farmland to developers. Call me a socialist when it comes to farming. I don't care. I want to be sure that there's food on the table for many centuries to come in our great nation. Once the farm land is gone, it never comes back, and it's heartbreaking.
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