Georgia’s law requires private and government employers to use E-Verify, a federal program, to ensure that workers are eligible to work in the United States. The law also increased the penalties for using fake documents to obtain jobs; offenders now face up to 15 years in prison and $250,000 in fines. Moreover, the law makes it a criminal offense to intentionally transport or harbor illegal immigrants, authorizes local and state law enforcement officials to arrest illegal immigrants and house them in state and federal jails, and requires documentation verifying legal status before people can apply for food stamps or government housing.

Alabama’s law goes even further than Georgia’s. It not only clamps down on illegal immigration, it also prevents illegal immigrants already in the state from establishing themselves. The law requires public schools to verify students’ residency status with birth certificates, bans illegal immigrants from state colleges, and outlaws transporting, harboring, employing, or renting property to undocumented immigrants. The bill also requires law enforcement officers to detain and investigate anyone they reasonably suspect is an illegal.

Opposition to the new laws emerged immediately in both states. In Alabama, churches and charities thought the wording so stringent that they worried about being implicated simply for ministering to illegal immigrants. Episcopal, Methodist, and Catholic church officials in Alabama sued Governor Robert Bentley and Attorney General Luther Strange. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Alabama and Georgia, as well as other civil liberties advocacy groups, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, also brought forward lawsuits because the new law will likely result in racial profiling.

While the specific methods of implementation for Alabama’s and Georgia’s immigration laws could be altered in the hope of minimizing their social consequences by, for example, randomly checking people for citizenship instead of profiling people who look different or out of place, the negative economic results cannot be avoided or minimized unless the laws are ignored. New business paperwork, law enforcement, and incarceration will impose steep costs. All industries will suffer some negative effects, and the fortunes of a number of industries, such as agriculture, restaurants, landscaping, catfish and poultry processing, and construction, will be seriously compromised. Jeffrey Passel estimated in a 2006 study that across the nation, illegal immigrants make up 24 percent of the agricultural workforce, 17 percent of the cleaning industry workforce, 14 percent of the construction workforce, 12 percent of the food preparation workforce, and 9 percent of the production workforce.

The effects of the new laws are already being felt throughout the agricultural industry in both states. Illegal immigrants are now so afraid of imprisonment and deportation that they have stopped supplying their labor during harvest seasons. And it’s not just illegals who are fleeing the state. Green-card carrying immigrants also quit their jobs in protest and are leaving Alabama.

Wasted Crops

Alabama Live reports that central Alabama farmers requested an emergency suspension of the law because millions of dollars of crops were at risk of not being harvested due to labor shortages. In the Wall Street Journal, Alabama Deputy Commissioner for Agriculture and Industry Brett Hall was quoted saying: “We have a big problem on our hands. . . . [F]armers and business people could go under.” Economists say the law will hurt Alabama’s economy, but politicians such as State Sen. Scott Beason (a Republican) called their arguments “absolutely, positively wrong”. He also called the Alabama law “the biggest jobs program for Alabamians that has ever been passed.”

Meanwhile Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Georgia’s law has already caused a severe enough labor shortage that farmers are at risk of leaving up to $300 million of crops rotting in their fields.

The construction industry, which has relied on immigrants in recent years, is also being hit hard. Despite the remaining slack from the housing crisis, delays in Alabama and Georgia are common. Nowhere is the story more tragic than in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where residents and businesses downtown were hit by a tornado last April. Cheap, efficient labor was desperately needed. Yet reconstruction in Tuscaloosa has been slow and has lagged behind Joplin, Missouri, which was hit with a much more severe tornado a month later. While some of the delays in Tuscaloosa can be blamed on red tape, the harsh immigration law certainly has not helped matters.

Unambiguous Benefits

Despite politicians’ ill-informed rhetoric and pro-law rallies by Tea Party groups, the economics of the issue remain unambiguous: Immigration, whether legal or illegal, is a net general benefit for the people of a state or country. The argument is an easy extension of David Ricardo’s argument for free trade; blocking immigration hampers the free operation of an economy in much the same way that blocking trade does. It prevents resources, including labor, from being reallocated to those industries and locations where consumers most urgently want them.

The evidence shows that immigration does not take away jobs or even decrease wages for native workers. Julian Simon in a 1995 study found that immigration does not increase unemployment for U.S. citizens, even among minority and low-skilled workers. George Borjas and Lawrence Katz, in a study published in 2007, found that the only group adversely affected by immigration in the United States was high school dropouts, who saw a long-run 4.8 percent reduction in wages.

Borjas and Katz assumed that immigrant and native workforces do the same work, an assumption that does not bear out empirically. Even with that assumption, however, Borjas in 2008 estimated the net economic gain to native workers from immigration to be around $22 billion annually. When Gianmarco I. P. Ottavanio and Giovanni Peri corrected for this assumption in a 2006 study, they found immigration actually increased natives’ wages in the short and long runs because immigrants complement the native workforce.

More Workers, More Prosperity

As coauthor Luke points out from his farm experience, Americans usually don’t want the jobs that immigrants are willing to take.

The number of jobs in an economy is unlimited because our wants are unlimited. The more people working, the further down our list of wants we can get. Moreover, the more people working, the more potential customers—and hence business opportunities—we have. Immigrants buy or rent houses, purchase food and goods, and dine at restaurants. This is why the United States did not suffer mass unemployment as our population drastically increased over the last few decades, and why there wasn’t a jump in unemployment when women joined the labor force. (See graph.)

Another common argument for the Alabama and Georgia laws is that immigrants will flood U.S. cities beyond capacity in search of higher living standards. If people migrated en masse to those areas with the highest wage rates, one may wonder why all U.S. citizens don’t flood Malibu, California. The reason is that real estate values adjust upward to act as a natural brake on migration. In addition, while there is much need for immigrant labor in the United States, workers will come here only as long as the expected wage exceeds their domestic wages plus the costs of relocating. As more immigrants resettle, the relevant wage will drop, decreasing their main incentive for coming in the first place.

The Welfare Argument

A third justification for legal restrictions is to prevent immigrants from living off government programs. Anyone concerned about this should ask why the Alabama, Arizona, and Georgia laws focus almost all enforcement efforts on preventing immigrants from working. Although immigration laws have provided strong incentives for immigrants not to work, Simon’s 1995 study calculated that on net they paid more into government programs than they took out.

The justifications for Alabama’s and Georgia’s laws fail to pass the test of basic economics. Not only do these laws not bode well for the economy, they also tar the civil rights images of two states that historically have suffered poor reputations in that department. In a country founded on open immigration and the basic freedom of human association and commerce, laws of this nature are a travesty.

I had to admit he was on to something.

The local-foods movement, springing from a generally affluent, generally left-leaning, and disenchanted consumer base, has been so thoroughly identified with a “liberal” mantra that the movement is often derided by the right.  To be sure, much of the poetic allegiances, arbitrary “local” circumferences, and irrational fears of all things Monsanto grates on the nerves of those who pride themselves on reasoned decision-making.  Yet for those of us who see folly in centralized power, this movement has something to tell us.  It is reinventing how many of us eat — and how an increasing number of us produce — food.

Danger to the Individual

The litany of abuses by centralized power against the individual is long and predictable.  But centralization in agriculture, that hazy realm from which our food spontaneously appears, poses its own set of dangers to individual aspirations.  Now that fewer than 2 percent of the population is directly engaged in food production (down from 25 percent at the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt’s failed drive to “save the farmer”), the fact that agriculture has been massively consolidated is inescapable.  While this is not entirely a bad thing (obesity now trumps hunger in our collective top-ten list of concerns), it does present a troubling side.  When the vast majority of meat processing (87 percent) is done by just four companies, the system is top-heavy and fragile.  Coupled with the crony-capitalism of a powerful lobby, centralized agriculture makes youthful entry into agriculture difficult and financially reckless.  The local-foods movement offers an alternative to this agricultural-industrial complex, presenting producers with healthier profit potentials and reviving a more diffuse and independent agrarian production base.

In an address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in 1859, Abraham Lincoln stated that “no other human occupation opens so wide a field for the profitable and agreeable combination of labor with cultivated thought, as agriculture.”  The advent of highly mechanized industrial production systems has largely erased this intellectual and emotional bond that Jefferson and Lincoln relied on to create virtuous citizen-farmers.  But now, perhaps even as a result of this, a newfound appreciation for old patterns has sprung up.  Many alleged leftists have found that concepts of freedom and individuality resonate strongly if rooted in a land ethic and in local produce.  For them centralization in markets and among corporations is of more pressing concern than centralization of political power, and feeding their dollars into local agriculture is a palatable way to participate in a free market.  Ironically enough, while many so-called liberals express skepticism about laissez-faire economies, they are the first to indignantly resist intrusion by bureaucrats into local farmers’ markets.

Ideology Irrelevant

It has always struck me as exemplifying the beauty of a free market that I sweat and toil to serve a clientele to which in general I’m ideologically opposed.  I serve customers who, if their Obama bags, Che t-shirts, and “profit is poison” bumper stickers are to be taken seriously, are decidedly anti-capitalist.  And yet during the course of our clearly capitalistic transactions, we both find pleasure in the process and discover a newfound respect for each other.

The revival of local food and local markets is an interesting phenomenon.  While it still marches under the banner of the left, it blurs the political distinctions enough that the right ought to feel comfortable joining in.  They say politics makes for poor digestion. Who knew that what we digest makes for good politics?

Today much of Africa remains hungry—almost a third of sub-Saharan Africa is undernourished. Since the late 1960s Africa’s agricultural production has been in decline: Farm productivity has dropped and food imports have risen. African governments are complicit in the continent’s hunger because they have hindered their citizens’ ability to grow as much food as possible.

In Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa, Robert Paarlberg argues that Africa fails to feed itself in part because of the limited use of biotechnology and blames African governments and their European counterparts for that failure. Starved for Science explains how the increased use of genetically modified seeds would benefit African farmers—and stomachs—and explains why the use of biotechnology and other agricultural science is so limited in Africa.

Paarlberg, who teaches political science at Wellesley College, makes the case for science in agriculture by detailing the dramatic impact the vast changes in agriculture have had over the past few hundred years. The book focuses on the latter half of the twentieth century, when the Green Revolution swept through Asia and, through the use of technology, hugely bolstered agricultural production.

Africa desperately needs similar changes—yields per acre in some African countries are less than a tenth of yields in the United States. African farmers would gain greatly from better technologies and seeds. Unfortunately, government policies stand in their way.

Paarlberg blames developed-world biases for Africa’s lack of agricultural improvement, especially a bias against genetically modified (GM) foods that dramatically limits Africa’s ability to grow more. In part these biases stem from the developed world’s ability to feed itself without a strong emphasis on the agricultural sciences or GM foods. Officials can therefore indulge environmentalist crusades against agricultural progress without apparent cost.

The European Union, non-governmental organizations, and the United Nations all played a role in exporting these biases to Africa, although the local governments also deserve a share of the blame. Instead of helping African farmers grow bigger crops to feed more people, European governments are doing the reverse, actively working to strengthen regulations in African countries, making the approval and use of GM seeds more difficult, and subsequently decreasing the potential productivity of African farmers. The governments of Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway, for example, have funded efforts to promote anti-GM regulatory frameworks and deprive farmers of the best tools they have. Similarly, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) exists not to help African farmers increase their output, but rather to increase the regulations that inhibit their farming.

Starved for Science makes a succinct case regarding the who’s and why’s of the barriers to Africa’s biotechnology use, but there are a few components of Paarlberg’s argument that could be stronger.

He spends little time discussing the specific problems that biotechnology can solve and the specific advantages of GM seeds. Although he details the possibilities of a drought-resistant seed, Paarlberg does not delve deeply into the successes of GM seeds in countries where they are currently being used, such as South Africa. With freedom to make their own decisions South African farmers are growing more food for themselves and their families and have enough extra to sell to others. Beyond increasing the local supply of food, having extra crops allows the farmers to increase the sizes of their farms, create jobs, start other businesses, and save money for the future.

The other incomplete aspect of Starved for Science deals with the incentives Africans face when debating growing GM crops. Even when they have the choice of using GM seeds they have to decide if it’s worth doing so, since European markets usually ban GM goods. The book would have been improved if Paarlberg had investigated the tradeoffs here more thoroughly.

Allowing free rein for biotechnology would be an important step toward eliminating the hunger that plagues Africa. The sad truth is that politics is apt to continue obstructing that and other avenues of progress.

Certainly, gas prices are high for various reasons, not the least of them being ridiculous government regulatory, environmental, and monetary policies. Nevertheless, consumers and businesses respond rapidly to changing conditions and rising prices. A few months ago, I was surrounded on the freeways by large SUVs, minivans, and those mega-pickup trucks that look like they’ve been plucked from a monster-truck event at Anaheim Stadium. Of course, the roads still have their share of bigger vehicles, but these days the roads are abuzz with Focuses, Priuses, and Civics. Traffic is noticeably down, as drivers have cut back on trips or have chosen carpooling, mass transit, and other alternatives, such as telecommuting.

As the Los Angeles Times recently reported, Americans seem to have lost their “faith” in free markets in the wake of higher gas prices, the housing bust, and bank troubles. But whether or not individuals trust the market is not as important as this reality: they live by the market. They make changes—sometimes lifestyle changes—based on their own budgets, and price signals are more effective (and more in keeping with a free society) than government rules at spurring such change.

So those of us who understand a few things about free markets aren’t too worried (beyond our normal pocketbook considerations) when we see the trends. As long as the government doesn’t place too many barriers in the way, increasing gas prices will make it economically feasible for oil companies to find new sources of oil or more efficiently tap existing wells. Oil alternatives will spring up. It doesn’t matter if my car is powered by gasoline or chicken droppings. People might be encouraged to adjust their lifestyles somewhat, but I would be shocked if the energy situation causes widespread changes in most Americans’ daily lives.

Doomsayers Versus the Market

Every “crisis,” however, gives voice to those who believe that current lifestyles are “unsustainable” and must be changed—for the sake of the planet! The telling point: these doomsayers never are content allowing the natural market process to cause these changes. Nope. They always are pushing for government policies to mandate the changes.

James Howard Kunstler is the author of World Made by Hand, described as “a novel about America’s post-oil future.” He is closely associated with the New Urbanist and Smart Growth movements, which seek to use government regulation to promote high-density urban living and restrict the development of traditional suburbs. In a June 8 column in the Dallas Morning News, Kunstler seemed almost gleeful about the high energy prices that have been annoying car-driving Americans.

“Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for ‘solutions,’ ” Kunstler wrote. “This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation. . . . I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to keep our ‘Happy Motoring’ utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the Interstate Highway System—or even a fraction of these things—in the future. We have to make other arrangements.”

In Kunstler’s view, our modern economic system doesn’t create vibrant economies, healthy diets, and wonderful health care. Instead, our oil-based “utopia” is about keeping running those things most disdained by Kunstler and other environmental elites—theme parks, discount stores, highways.

Kunstler, who is a fairly typical voice among environmental/urban-planning doomsayers, sees no possibility for additional oil exploration or for meaningful alternatives. Once “global demand for oil exceeds the global supply,” that’s it. Our “complex systems of daily life” will be shaken to the core. Everything will change. He lists these things: food production, commerce and trade, our means of travel, urban development, our acquisition of capital, governance, health care, education, and more. “These problems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis.”

Are We in Denial?

The nation is, in his view, engaged in a massive fantasy or is in a deep state of denial. Most of us are too dimwitted to understand what Kunstler sees:

So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we’ll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We’ll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life. We’ll have to restore local economic networks—the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed—made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers. We’ll also have to occupy the landscape differently, in traditional towns, villages and small cities. Our giant metroplexes are not going to make it, and the successful places will be ones that encourage local farming.

Kunstler sees an end to regular airline travel, but believes that “fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we could undertake right away that would have the greatest impact on the country’s oil consumption.” But don’t worry, he explains, “We don’t have to be crybabies about this.” Americans simply need to understand that we can’t keep “getting something for nothing” and we need to be “honest about the way the universe really works.”

These are shocking suggestions, of course, and when Kunstler says “we,” one can only surmise that he means “the government.” Most Americans tend to be unwilling to dramatically reorganize their everyday lives just because some academics don’t like their suburban, car-oriented lifestyles. But Kunstler does remind us, albeit accidentally, about one way the world works: ideologues try to gain power for their world-saving visions, and if they do, the rest of us better watch out. Kunstler’s ideas seem more closely related to Pol Pot’s urban-clearing experiment than anything envisioned by our founders.

There’s so much silliness here to debunk. How exactly could farmers grow sufficient amounts of food close to home here in the sprawling 17-million-population, quasi-desert Los Angeles basin? If anyone tried this, wouldn’t industrial techniques be needed to produce the highest possible yield on the least amount of land if it were to succeed? Yet Kunstler wants this food to have “more human attention.” He wants agriculture to return to the center of our economic life. I suppose the government can tear up the existing network of freeways and plant corn and alfalfa there instead, but I can’t quite see why this is such a necessity. I don’t have any great desire to spend my days either harvesting food or working as a cog in one of those “fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.” Then again, personal desire has no place in this dystopia. (As urban author Jane Jacobs wrote, “As in all utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge.”) Kunstler is saying that we should give up our professions as writers, academics, doctors, entrepreneurs, and builders and instead trade foodstuffs or sell things in giant farmers’ markets. No thank you. Now you see why a little force might be necessary to implement this vision.

As a prominent New Urbanist/Smart Growther, Kunstler predictably prefers living in small, traditional towns. Most New Urbanists I know are content building Yuppie malls that pretend to be old townes (you’ve got to have the “e” at the end if you want to target the right demographic), railing against suburbia, and lobbying city councils to stop proposed new housing tracts. But how exactly would those of us living in suburbia come to occupy the landscape differently? I know Kunstler’s proposal is post-apocalyptic. He sees the oil crisis as a shock to the current system. But, still, we can’t just abandon the equity (such as it is in this declining market!) in our four-bedroom “McMansions” (the derogatory elitist term for newer suburban homes), push our $30,000 cars over the cliffs at Malibu, and try to find some village in the Sierras to move into.

Yet it’s Kunstler who suggests that the rest of us are living in a fantasy world.

Not everyone in the environmental and planning “communities” is looking to such radical solutions, but there’s lots of gloating about high gas prices by anti-suburban scolds.

In an article titled “Gas Prices Changing the Face of America,” the website “Smart Growth America” argues: “Though struggling with near-term implications, many are starting to wonder how a future of costly energy will reshape their lives and landscape. You can already see it in the housing market, where people are unable to unload McMansions in partly finished, distant subdivisions for the same reason they can’t sell their large SUVs: Potential buyers don’t want the high gas bills. Americans are beginning to ask themselves the big questions: ‘How did we get to a situation where the only option we have is to drive? Why can’t I take a train to work? Why can’t my kids walk to school like I did?’”

Of course, it’s perfectly reasonable for people to seek out such options when gas prices go up (although as a former East Coast transit rider, I can’t understand the love affair with dirty buses and crammed subway cars). Farther-out suburbs are suffering the most as gas prices soar, for the obvious reason that it becomes more costly to commute from such neighborhoods. It would be nice for Smart Growthers to call for fewer building regulations rather than more of them, which would enable more Americans to live closer to their jobs. But that’s expecting a bit much from activists who believe that Americans should live packed together in condos and apartments.

Increased Government Control

The Smart Growth folks have a series of proposals also detailed on the website. They almost all involve more government control over land use and other decisions. The philosophy is best summarized by this proposal: “By directing growth to communities where people already live and work, smart growth limits the amount of farmland and open space that is developed, makes existing communities more attractive—with a mix of housing, restaurants, parks, cafes, and jobs, and minimizes the need for new water, sewer and road infrastructure that increase taxpayer burdens.”

This is all about coercion. All growth will be directed into existing communities. Farmland and open space will be “protected” from growth. This Smart Growth agenda would obliterate America’s system of property rights. If cities are bad, and the countryside must be protected, then where will 300 million Americans live? Wouldn’t the creation of a new village-based society cause the massive sprawl that these urban planners are so worried about? Ironically, some of Kunstler’s ideas have support among paleoconservatives, who are trying to create a Norman Rockwell-esque America. Don’t any of these folks have any concern about the ideas of freedom or individualism? Ignore the last question; we already know the answer.

Ideas generated by folks such as Kunstler, who was celebrated at a Congress for the New Urbanism conference I attended a couple of years ago, create the philosophical base for these Smart Growth organizations, which have successfully influenced planning groups and government organizations—so much so that we can see their footprint in every new subdivision built. One proposed near my house is typical. The city approved 16 homes on 30 acres, but all the homes must be crammed together on tiny lots, with the bulk of the land set aside as open space. That’s a New Urbanist concept. I’ve written about local cities that subsidize downtown development and promote condo construction and “live/work lofts” even as they use regulatory takings to deprive property owners of the right to build on open space. These are the real-world outgrowths of the Kunstler philosophy. It’s easy to laugh at the absurdity of what he proposes, but these doom-and-gloom scenarios lead to specific regulatory agendas. In California, state officials are using global-warming rules and water access as specific means to shut down suburban growth. At the federal level a California Democratic congresswoman and a Republican senator are pushing for a return to that old Nixon- and Carter-era “gas-saving” standby—the 55 mph national speed limit. Never mind that most Americans drive at the natural speed limit of any given road and that few savings would result. There’s no end to coercive proposals by those who are hostile to freedom and the market or believe that government’s role is to prod and improve individuals to help them make the “right” decisions.

The Survival of Suburbia

Media coverage certainly enhances the urgency of these proposals. A recent CNN.com news story was headlined, “Is America’s Suburban Dream Collapsing into a Nightmare?” The article was about the subprime mess, which has certainly been nightmarish for some individuals. But suburbia, I suspect, will survive. If anything, the subprime-driven housing crisis is a needed self-correction of a government-driven problem. But that’s a difficult argument to make in the face of Armageddon! Here’s Kunstler again (he’s so quotable) from a speech he gave in 2005 to the PetroCollapse New York Conference:

We’ve become a nation of overfed clowns and crybabies, afraid of the truth, indifferent to the common good, hardly even a common culture, selfish, belligerent, narcissistic whiners seeking every means possible to live outside a reality-based community. These are the consequences of a value system that puts comfort, convenience, and leisure above all other considerations. . . . We’ve signed off on all other values since the end of World War II. . . . Consumers have no duties, obligations or responsibilities to anything besides their own desire to eat more Cheez Doodles and drink more beer.

Apparently, Kunstler’s issues go deeper than concern about the loss of an important energy source. Keep these quotations in mind, though, given that they offer a window in the thinking of those who will use this and every other “crisis” to push for what they have always really wanted: massive, government reorganization of society.

The debate over free trade is, and has been for over 200 years, quite contentious. In reading over the historical debates, it often seems as if no ground has been made by the advocates of a global, borderless economy. Indeed, this is what makes reading Adam Smith, John Bright, and Frédéric Bastiat essential even today—their arguments seem to have lost none of their relevancy.

But if the ideological battle is still in its early stages, the scope and depth of free trade has zoomed ahead. As much as libertarians may complain about the rise of supra-organizations like the WTO and bilateral trade agreements supervised by government and corporate interests, it’s hard to argue with the data: the world is perhaps witnessing the freest movement of goods and people in history. It is worth taking stock of this fact before we go back to haranguing the Lou Dobbses of the world.

The problem, however, with reaching a new level of anything positive is the tendency to get complacent and admire the view.

Dani Rodrik, professor of international political economy at Harvard, seems to think that we’ve reached the End of Free Trade History. In an op-ed penned last March for the Financial Times, he argued: “[N]o country’s growth prospects are significantly constrained today by the lack of openness of the international economy. Even if [the] Doha [round of trade talks] fails, poor countries will have enough access to rich country markets to achieve what countries like China, Vietnam, and India have been able to do. Closed markets may have been a fundamental problem during the 1950s and 1960s—in the early days of the current wave of globalization; it is hard to believe that they still are.”

Can this be so? Have we had so much global integration that we can kick back, consolidate the growth, and live fat and happy from here until eternity? While we may one day reach a point when all the world can buy goods from whomever it wishes, the young 21st century is far from that ideal.

The first, and most obvious, rebuttal is that it’s no great feat to reach the income levels of India, China, and Vietnam. China, the country from which I write, is incredibly poor. While the view out the window of my Shanghai apartment is glitz and glamour, a short trip out of the city and into the Chinese countryside would persuade anyone to postpone popping the champagne. According to the most recent data, China’s per capita GDP is $7,600, while in the United States it’s around $43,000.

India fares much worse, despite the best efforts of Tom Friedman to position the country as the greatest economic competitor to the United States. While to many the entire country is epitomized by the call centers of Bangalore, India is astoundingly poor. Its GDP has not yet reached $1 trillion, even with the second largest population in the world. What countries like India and China have achieved is remarkable, but they could still use a heavy dose of trade-led development.

Next, it’s hard to grasp exactly what Rodrik means when he asserts that developing nations have as much access to the global economy as they need. Enough for what? the reader is tempted to ask. Even the wealthiest societies on the planet could benefit from a rapid and complete opening up of trade. As the division of labor expands and individuals are allowed to further specialize, society benefits from the increased production and efficiency. The more individuals that are brought within this fold, the greater the benefits to all of society. Within the United States, billions of dollars are lost to stupid and wasteful protectionist programs (the much-maligned agriculture subsidies being but one such example). And if the country stands to gain significantly from opening up even further, imagine the benefits that could accrue to less-developed nations.

Part of the problem (or more accurately, part of the misunderstanding) stems from the habit of social scientists to view independent political units as the most important variable. But free trade is important to individuals, not nations. Thus while comparative advantage is usually discussed in reference to Country X producing widgets and Country Y producing ridgets, it’s more to the point to say that individuals specialize in producing certain goods. (As Kierkegaard seemed to suggest, society is an abstraction without hands.)

Take one group of individuals who would greatly benefit from increased access to the world’s economy: poor Third World farmers. According to Kym Anderson and Ernesto Valenzuela of the World Bank, “[D]eveloping country farmers . . . account for 43 percent of global employment, 64 percent of global agricultural value added, and a similarly large share of global poverty as measured by earnings of less than $1 a day.” The scandal of rich-country agricultural protectionism is now notorious, with all sides of the political spectrum seemingly in agreement that the barriers to trade must come down. Anderson and Valenzuela estimate that an end to protectionism (that is, full liberalization) would provide an incredible boost to the output of developing countries.

What He Got Right

While I’ve focused mainly on what Rodrik got wrong in his piece, it’s worth mentioning what he got right. His main thrust was that the cheerleaders of globalization, those who unquestioningly support the current modus operandi of globalization, will ultimately undermine free trade. Here Rodrik may be right, but for the wrong reasons. Rich nations, he argues, should be allowed wiggle room in trade agreements to boost their welfare state (or as he calls it, their social contract). The trade-at-all-cost element blocks this meaningful reform, he argues. But the real reason the current cheerleaders of globalization threaten free trade is that they so often fail to point out how rigged the system is. While many may feel that to criticize the WTO is to provide succor to the protectionists, the truth is that by not giving the WTO the hairy eyeball, the true goal of free trade is obscured or even lost.

Given the obvious exclusion from the global trading order that so many from the developing world face, Rodrik should know better than to argue that they’re players in the world economy. For myriad reasons, governments across the globe keep their subjects from interacting fully with individuals beyond their political borders. This is a human-rights abuse in the true sense of the term.

The headline in the New York Times screamed: “World Hunger Increasing, New U.N. Report Finds.” Coming as it did just two days before Thanksgiving, the irony couldn’t be lost on the average reader. The opening paragraph made clear that the situation was dire. “The number of hungry people worldwide swelled in recent years, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to war, drought, AIDS and trade barriers, according to a report released today by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization” (FAO).¹

What exactly is happening here? Haven’t market liberals been applauding the good news that world hunger is diminishing? Didn’t the left-of-center Bjørn Lomborg make that same point in his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist? Have the environmental doomsayers finally been proven right?

The headline was not quite accurate. The FAO report, “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003,” covers undernourishment in the developing world only from base years 1990–1992 to 1999–2001. The results can depend on how that time frame is examined. During the full period, the number of undernourished dropped both in raw terms, from 816.6 million to 797.9 million, and in percentage terms, from 20 percent to 17 percent.² But if the period is divided into halves, a slightly different picture emerges. The raw number of undernourished dropped to 779.7 million in the first half, but then increased to 797.9 million in the second. The increase in the second half is less than the decrease in the first half, meaning that over the whole period the raw number still declined by 18.7 million. During that same period, the population of the developing world increased by a massive 662.2 million. Thus within a ten-year period, about 681 million additional people were being fed.³

The choice of base year can also affect how dramatic the decline in hunger will appear. The report uses 1990–92. From then until now the undernourished proportion of the population declined from 20 percent to 17 percent. Had the UN gone back one decade further, the decline would have been more impressive, since in 1980, 28 percent were hungry. While the improvement may have slowed down, we should not overlook that this is still an improvement.

The Times reported “that more than 840 million people, or 1 in 7 world-wide, went hungry.” The foreword to the report says: “[A]n estimated 798 million were undernourished in 1999–2001.” Why the discrepancy?

The UN report basically covers the developing world. But in one section it mentions a total world figure of 842 million, which includes 10 million in the industrialized nations and 34 million in transitional nations, mainly the former Soviet bloc.⁴ In a sense that 842 million figure is a combination of apples and oranges. Being undernourished in London and being undernourished in rural Tanzania are two different things.

The general improvement in undernourishment rates applies across most of the globe. During the last decade, hunger rates dropped in Asia and the Pacific from 20 to 16 percent and in Latin America and the Caribbean from 13 to 10 percent. Even sub-Saharan Africa’s rate dropped from 35 to 33 percent. Only in the Near East and north Africa did rates go up, from 8 to 10 percent. Some of the subregions had rather impressive declines. East Africa saw a decline from 44 to 39 percent; southern Africa, from 48 to 41 percent; West Africa, from 21 to 15 percent; east Asia, from 20 to 16 percent; and South America, from 14 to 10 percent.⁵

Such large regional drops in hunger rates were ignored by the Times. It reported instead: “Only 19 countries, including China, reduced hunger among its people throughout the 1990s.” That is simply not true. The real number is far in excess of 19. The reporter apparently misread the report, which says: “In 19 countries, the number of chronically hungry people declined by over 80 million between 1990–1992 and 1999–2001.”⁶ The Times inserted the word “only,” giving the impression that everywhere else hunger increased or stayed the same. The word “only” is not in the report for good reason. The report ignores many countries where hunger is not a problem. (The word “only” did appear in an FAO press release. But the context made clear that this is 19 countries within the developing world only and it doesn’t say they were the only developing nations where the rate improved.)

The report’s statistical tables tell a different story from the one the Times told. The tables clearly show that of the 90 developing nations, 32 saw a reduction in the total number of undernourished people. In 60 nations, or two-thirds of the developing world, the total number went up, but as a percentage of the population, the rates actually declined.

A Few Bad Places

The problem is that a few spots in the world are suffering badly. As noted, hunger is up from 10 to 14 percent in the Near East;⁷ in central Africa it was even worse. Hunger rates there went from 35 to 58 percent.⁸ By looking at the nations that saw dramatic shifts in undernourishment rates, either improvements or declines, we can start to pinpoint some of the major causes of world hunger today.

For instance pro-market reforms in China are clearly having benefits. At the beginning of the last decade the number of undernourished there was 193 million. Even though the population increased by 105.5 million, the number of undernourished declined almost 58 million—to a raw total of 135.3 million. The percentage of undernourished dropped from 16 to 11 percent. On the other hand, hard-line socialist North Korea saw the opposite happen. During the base years 18 percent of North Koreans were undernourished, but by the end of the decade, the rate had increased to 34 percent.⁹

In Vietnam, markets were liberalized and the number of undernourished dropped from 27 to 19 percent. In Venezuela a “pro-poor” socialist government took over and the rate of undernourished jumped from 11 to 18 percent.¹⁰

It quickly becomes clear that world hunger today is not caused by a strain on the planet or an inability to produce food, as many environmentalists have contended. Hunger today is primarily a politically induced problem. As FAO director general Jacques Diouf says, “Bluntly stated, the problem is not so much a lack of food as a lack of political will.”¹¹

Hunger is routinely caused by bad economic policies or armed political conflict. The cessation of conflict in Angola brought undernourishment rates down from 61 to 49 percent. In Mozambique the end of the civil war saw a decline from 69 to 53 percent. In contrast, the continuing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo increased the rate from 31 to 75 percent.¹² The FAO report noted: “Eight countries suffered [food] emergencies during 15 or more years during 1986–2003. War or civil strife was a major factor in all eight.”¹³

Undernourishment figures for the Near East, another region where hunger increased, shows a similar pattern. For the region as a whole the UN says the rate increased from 10 to 14 percent. But if you exclude Iraq and Afghanistan, the rate would have hardly changed—from around 6 percent to 6.5 percent.¹⁴

Economic Growth Is Key

A key factor in reducing hunger is economic growth. The report notes: “In countries that succeeded in reducing hunger throughout the nine-year period, GDP per capita grew at an annual rate of 2.6 percent—more than five times higher than the rate in countries where undernourishment increased in both subperiods (0.5 percent).”¹⁵ If, as the report notes, strong economic growth is associated with a reduction in hunger, then globalization is critical to ending world hunger. A World Bank report has stated that “the more globalized developing countries have increased their per capita growth rate from 1 percent in the 1960s, to 3 percent in the 1970s, 4 percent in the 1980s, and 5 percent in the 1990s. Their growth rates now substantially exceed those of the rich countries.”¹⁶ The FAO report acknowledges this: “Overall, countries that are more involved in trade tend to enjoy higher rates of economic growth.”¹⁷

This doesn’t meant that nature has no role to play. Many food-insecure countries are still plagued by periodic droughts and/or flooding, which limits their ability to grow food. On the other hand, even these problems are exacerbated by local cultural and/or economic policies. Many African countries promote subsistence farming in the belief that a nation of farmers will never go hungry. But only a nation of farmers can starve to death since during natural disasters they have nothing to trade for food. The FAO report verifies this indirectly: “Throughout the developing world, agriculture accounts for around 9 percent of GDP and more than half of total employment. But its relative importance is far greater in those countries where hunger is most widespread. In countries where more than 34 percent of the population are undernourished, agriculture represents 30 percent of GDP, and nearly 70 percent of the people rely on agriculture for their livelihoods.”¹⁸

Today the West gets blamed for protectionist agricultural policies that keep out imports from the Third World. A change in such policies is needed immediately. But change will help only those Third World countries that have liberalized their domestic markets. Generally speaking, the nations that have liberalized are not the ones still suffering high rates of hunger. The nations that are starving are mainly the victims of local politics and internal warfare. The planet can well feed the numbers we have now and many, many more. The problem isn’t unsustainable development or an inability to produce. It’s a problem of getting governments out of the way.

Notes

1. Somini Sengupta, “World Hunger Increasing, New U.N. Report Finds,” New York Times, November 25, 2003; http://college3.nytimes.com/guests/articles/2003/11/25/1126810.xml.
2. Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, “The State of Food Insecurity in the World, 2003,” p. 31; www.fao.org/docrep/006/j0083e/j0083e00.htm.
3. Calculations based on tables in ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 6.
5. Ibid., pp. 31–32.
6. Ibid., p. 4.
7. Ibid., p. 32.
8. Ibid.
9. Based on table in ibid., p. 34.
10. Ibid., p. 31.
11. Ibid., p. 4.
12. Ibid., p. 32.
13. Ibid., p. 14.
14. Based on tables in ibid., p. 32.
15. Ibid., p. 8.
16. World Bank, Globalization, Growth, and Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 5.
17. “The State of Food Insecurity,” p. 16.
18. Ibid.

We’re much more accustomed to hearing rulers in the developing world browbeat us about our meager “foreign aid” or our consumption of the “world’s” resources. So it was refreshing to see them object to intervention in agriculture, that most egregious violation of free-market principles.

U.S. officials especially like to deliver lectures on the virtues of free trade and helping the poor. Meanwhile, they keep in place a protectionist system that delivers a double whammy to those struggling for prosperity in the developing world.

First, at the behest of wealthy and well-connected farmers, the U.S. government maintains a variety of quotas and tariffs on imported agricultural products. (The same is true for textiles and apparel.) These interventions raise prices in the United States and constrict the export market to the detriment of people who might otherwise climb out of poverty. (For example, Brazilian sugar growers could produce twice as much and employ more people were it not for American quotas—a favor to U.S. sugar producers that raises the price to consumers.)

Second, subsidies to the growers of cotton, rice, peanuts, corn, and other crops throttle agricultural development in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. How can farmers there compete with American and European farmers when Western governments finance the overproduction of crops, which are then dumped in the poor countries at low prices?

Subsidies also cost the American taxpayers dearly. “The federal government doled out more than $114 billion in farm subsidies nationwide from 1995 through 2002,” the Lincoln( Nebraska) Journal Star reported recently.

The hypocrisy about helping the poor has a domestic dimension also. Virtually all politicians promise to end poverty and help “working families.” Yet they never advocate scrapping the tariffs and quotas that, by design, make it more expensive to buy food and clothing. Couldn’t we have free trade—for the children?

Some farmers will say they couldn’t get along without government help. Humbug. As columnist Deroy Murdock wrote, “Washington does not finance broccoli, chickens, lettuce or tomatoes. Yet somehow Americans devour these items daily. Those who propagate them earn profits or at least have the decency not to whimper about their losses to their congressmen.”

The governments that halted the WTO meeting certainly do not have exemplary records on trade or other aspects of freedom. Their countries wouldn’t be so poor if they did. But that doesn’t make them wrong in this instance. It would be nice if the so-called capitalist countries would lead by example. Nothing is more damaging to the case for freedom than hypocrisy.

* * *

A remarkable Canadian woman saw what was wrong with government schools in the 1950s, but she didn’t quite see the solution. Daniel Hager introduces this unsung hero.

It’s been said many times: incentives matter. Ralph Hood shows how incentives in the form of contests have produced advances in aviation.

And speaking of aviation, William Zieburtz marvels at all the trouble people go to just so he can fly.

Social Security is built on a foundation of myths. John Attarian says that until the myths are understood as such, solutions to the pension problem will remain flawed.

In a classic reprint from 1955, Dean Russell describes the coming of age of a capitalist.

When unemployment rises, the first call is to “save jobs.” As if the government were capable of doing such a thing. Timothy Terrell explains.

Scanning the world, it’s increasingly clear that what the have-nots lack is capitalism. So writes Andrew Bernstein.

In the columns: FEE President Richard Ebeling assesses the 90-year record of the Federal Reserve. Lawrence Reed reports on an incentive-based approach to organ donation. Thomas Szasz exposes a gap in the ACLU’s protection of civil liberties. Burton Folsom finds some lessons in the integration of baseball. Charles Baird unmasks the National Apprenticeship Act. And Donald Boudreaux, seeing the assertion that the state is the source of rights, responds, “It Just Ain’t So!”

Books reviewed this month explore Stalin at war, the history of socialism, and the market process.

The 2003 index begins on page 41.

—Sheldon Richman

“The Property Basis of Rights,” September 1980

There has been an attempt to separate property rights from other rights in this century. It has usually been done by labeling some rights as “human rights” and referring to others as “rights” of property. This distinction has been accompanied by the claim that “human rights” are superior to “property rights.”

. . . The distinction has not gone unchallenged. In the 1960s there was even a sort of slogan coined which called it into question. It went something like this: “Property rights are human rights.” The idea had some appeal. After all, rights are not something ordinarily thought of as belonging to plants or the lower animals. If there is a right to property, it must be first and foremost a human right. That was not, of course, quite the distinction the critics of property rights were attempting to make. They referred to property rights as if they were rights belonging to property. Those who challenged this concept maintained, to the contrary, that property rights were really rights of human beings to property. Thus, “Property rights are human rights.”

At the time, I agreed with this line of reasoning—I still do—and thought it stated the case adequately. However, further study and reflection have led me to a somewhat different conclusion. Property rights are not just another human right; such a statement understates the case. They are much more fundamental than that. Property rights are basic to all rights.

This relationship first occurred to me while studying the loss of rights in totalitarian countries. My general conclusion was that the loss of property rights either preceded or accompanied the loss of other rights. This was so in Hitler’s Germany. It was so in Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia. It has also been the case in other totalitarian countries. It is possible that some property rights could be retained while other rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion, freedom of association and so on, would be severely curtailed or taken away. But it is now inconceivable to me that other rights could be maintained when property rights were gone.

This suggests to me that there is a causal connection between property and other rights. The historical connection can be seen not only in countries where rights have been lost but also in countries where they were being established. For example, in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, real property was being made private and personal. At the same time, there was a movement for substantial freedom of religion. In the wake of the establishment of these came the protection of other rights. . . .

Conceptually, all rights are either elaborations or extensions of property rights. For example, in the United States a person has the right to order the disposition of his bodily remains after death, by will. The right to one’s body is an elaboration of property rights; indeed, it may be the most basic property right. A will is written to dispose of one’s property. Hence, the right to order by will what disposition shall be made of the body is an extension of the process.

Many rights are so closely tied to property rights that they are virtually indistinguishable from them. For example, the right to buy and sell or, more broadly, to trade freely, is a property right. It is an aspect of the ownership of property. Free speech and a free press are fundamentally property rights. . . .

There is probably no way of conceiving of individual rights other than as either property rights or extensions of property rights. . . .

All attempts to exorcise property from rights and privileges, then, are in vain. Any claim to a right or privilege is, in some sense, a claim to property. It is possible, of course, to downgrade private property. But in the process, individual rights are unavoidably undercut.

“Health Care: Cross Questions and Crooked Answers,” May 1980

At the sometimes innocent parties I went to when I was an adolescent we occasionally played a game called “Cross Questions and Crooked Answers.” Boys were lined up on one side and girls on the other. Each boy was handed a slip of paper on which a question was written. Each girl got one with an answer. When they had been written, each question had an appropriate answer to it. But they were passed out randomly so that, hopefully, the questions no longer matched the answers when they were read. If all went well, there would be a series of malaprops, inanities, and ribaldries.

A variation of Cross Questions and Crooked Answers has now achieved adult status. Political involvement in medicine has made it commonplace without our being aware of it. Let us take a statement first. It is usually worded something like this: “Every American should have quality medical care.” Now, the question, “Don’t you want the best quality medical care possible?” It is tempting to treat this as a straight question, and to make what appears to be the only reasonable answer. Namely, “Of course, I want the best quality medical care possible.” From that point on the discussion degenerates into a debate as to which is the best possible system for providing quality medical care. It may not be a futile debate, but it is apt to be inconclusive because the best points have been conceded by the answer given to the question.

This is so because “Don’t you want the best medical care possible?” is a Cross Question. It is a Cross Question which will most likely elicit a Crooked Answer. Indeed, it is what one of my professors in graduate school called a false question. A false question is one which can only be answered by giving an answer that will be in some part wrong, regardless of what angle you take on it.

To illustrate, let me give the opposite answer to the question, a somewhat perverse answer, if you like. “No, I do not want the best possible medical care. In fact, I do not want medical care at all. Medical care is not something one drools over, like a steak, the best cut of which everyone should have. I do not long for the ministrations of physicians or for the comforts of a hospital bed. Indeed, my preferences run in the opposite direction, to have as little truck with any of these as possible.”

The answer is evasive, of course, but it is evasion with a point. I want the question reworded. The first order of business is not the quality of medical care; medical care is only a means, not an end. The quality of life is my main concern, not the quality of medical care. The question might be rephrased this way: What do you want from life to which medical care (and its quality presumably) is directly related? Now that is a straight question which can be given a straight answer.

My answer would go something like this. I want the use of my faculties with as little impairment as possible. I want to see, hear, smell, feel, walk, taste, talk, and use my limbs well so that I can function normally. Why? So that I can look after myself. So that I can manage my own affairs. So that I can be independent in order to fulfill my purpose as a man. In short, my concern with medical care is as an adjunct to my personal independence.

Contemporary medical practice has this as its primary aim. Its aim is to maintain or restore the independence of the individual, to get him up and walking again, to get him to looking after his bodily needs, to get him to exercising his faculties, and so on. The desired goal is dismissal of the patient and a minimal dependence on drugs. In short, good medical practice requires that the patient be restored to independent status as quickly as in the judgment of the attending physician he is ready for it.

Medical care cannot correctly be considered in a vacuum. When we do so we can only ask Cross Questions and get Crooked Answers about it. It is part of the larger corpus of life itself, and ordinarily a subordinate part. In the context of the statements made above, the aim of medical care—the maintaining and restoring of personal independence—is part of the broader aim of personal independence for individuals. Whatever impairs the independence of the individual will tend to be detrimental to the aims of medicine. . . .

“Farming Is a Business,” August 1986

The plight of service station operators does not appear to ever have caught the public fancy. Not once in all my years as a diligent TV watcher can I recall having seen a special on the subject, or even a segment on the evening news about the disappearance of the family-operated service station. The television cameras have not focused on any sheriff’s bankruptcy sale of some service stations, with the sheriff surrounded by a bunch of surly service station operators protesting the sale. No legislatures or courts have declared a moratorium on foreclosures on service stations, to my knowledge. There are no Federal Service Station Banks to provide easy credit to go into the service station business. And, in all my years of perusing textbooks on American history, I have never encountered even a sentence about “The Service Station Problem,” much less a paragraph or a whole section of a chapter.

By contrast—and what makes the above so remarkable—I have seen reams of material over the years dealing with “The Farm Problem.” No presidential administration since that of Rutherford B. Hayes, at the latest, has managed to get by without some sort of “Farm Crisis.” Every sort of scheme, crackpot or otherwise, to deal with the farm problem has had its advocates, and many a bill has made its way through state legislatures and Congress that was supposed to address the problems of farmers. For more than a hundred years now those who claimed to speak for farmers have proclaimed the responsibility of government to help farmers, and for nearly as long governments have been passing legislation of one sort or another that was supposed to do just that. Inflation—back in the days when everyone understood that meant an increase in the money supply—was once considered to be the panacea for farm problems. Then it was regulation of rail rates, government-sponsored loan programs to provide easy credit, government-sponsored cooperative storage and crop loan facilities, parity payments, subsidies, and so on. No history book worthy of the name is minus sections planted here and there through the accounts of the last hundred years detailing the plight of the farmers. And, according to spokesmen for farmers, the problem is apparently as urgent today as ever, what with declining foreign markets, drops in the prices of farm lands, and widespread farm foreclosures.

It is not my point, of course, that farmers have not had and do not have problems. As far back as my information goes, farmers have always had problems of one sort or another. They have ever been hampered in their enterprise by droughts, floods, plagues, disease, fat years when prices fell and lean years when prices might rise but they produced much less. Farmers have been going into debt ever since merchants, factors, or bankers could be found to extend credit, many of them going deeper in debt from year to year in the vain hope that bumper crops could be sold at high prices to rescue them. Anyone who doubts this should study the accounts of American farmers and planters in our own colonial history. There have been many changes in technology and farming methods over the years, but the sort of financial problems encountered by commercial farmers have not changed much.

My point, rather, is that it is not all that clear that farmers differ that much in having problems from the rest of us who are exposed to the exigencies of the market—which is to say all of us, to greater or lesser extent. Even government workers sometimes lose their jobs, and politicians do not always get re-elected. But I started out to contrast farmers with service station operators, so allow me to stick with that for a bit. The woes of service stations over the years must often have been as great as those of farmers. True, many have left farming for other fields, especially over the past fifty years. But the number of service stations that have gone out of business during the same period must be very large, in view of the many abandoned businesses which dot the countryside. Service stations that remain in business also change hands or come under new management from time to time. One of the plaints about farming is that the family farm is disappearing, but service stations may also be operated by families. Whether service station operators are as prone to bankruptcy as farmers, I have no information, but undoubtedly many service station operators do not make a go of the business for one reason or another.

The central point I wish to make, however, is that farming is a business. In this crucial respect, it is like a host of other businesses. It has been contrasted with operating a service station not because farming is essentially different but because a great deal of political attention and a large number of political programs have been enacted that were supposed to aid farmers. By contrast, very little notice has been paid to service stations, and except for an occasional piece of legislation dealing with the treatment of independents by suppliers, service stations have rarely been singled out except for restrictive legislation. There are many other businesses for which there are no specific government aid programs: toymakers, for example, candy manufacturers, makers of cereals, and so on. Some businesses have been the objects of government programs which were supposed to aid them, of course, but none so massively, I think, nor over so long a period of time. Certainly businesses, in general, have not usually enjoyed public sympathy in this century; they have much more often been the subject of punitive regulation. Moreover, public opposition to and criticism of aiding other businesses has usually been vigorous.

Thus, it is important to emphasize that farming is a business. This is important for two reasons. First, it brings it into the correct framework for considering the appropriateness of providing aid. Second, it helps to cut away the alleged differences from other businesses. . . . This is not to deny that there are public benefits from farming, but these do not appear to differ from those that attend hundreds of other enterprises. . . .

“Of all the problems that plague the world’s poor in the age of globalization,” writes the Washington Post, “few are so widely condemned as the subsidies that rich countries provide their farmers” (“U.S. Farm Bill Finds Few Fans Abroad,” Washington Post, May 5, 2002). The farm bill signed into law by President Bush, “which substantially increases price guarantees for crops such as corn and wheat and creates new subsidies for others such as soybeans,” gives U.S. farmers large, artificial incentives to produce more, causing market floods and depressing crop prices worldwide. This in turn makes it difficult for Third World nations to build healthy agricultural infrastructures to boost their economies. The Post quoted Nancy Birdsall, director of the Washington-based Center for Global Development, as saying that farm subsidies are “very discouraging for developing countries.”

For example, the Post also reported that a then-forthcoming study by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund would show the effect that subsidies have on the world cotton industry. U.S. cotton farmers’ average annual income is $35,000, approximately one-third of which comes from subsidies. In the African nation of Burkina Faso, by comparison, cotton farmers are making around $1 per day. The study concludes that if world cotton prices were not being driven down by wealthy countries’ subsidies to their farmers, poverty in Burkina Faso could be cut in half within six years. “This [farm bill] is pretty galling,” said a senior World Bank official quoted by the Post. “A few American farmers will benefit, but at the expense of a very large number of poor people in developing countries.”

In addition, “European trade officials” warned, “the U.S. farm bill will make it tougher to overcome the resistance of farmers [in European countries] to giving up their subsidies,” the Post said. Commenting on the bill, Canadian agricultural minister Lyle Vanclief called U.S. price supports “ridiculous policy” because his government might now have to increase aid to Canadian farmers. The cycle of world crop-price deflation will continue, bankrupting impoverished countries’ farmers and condemning more of their people to squalor.

None of this is surprising. After all, advocates of free and open agricultural markets have warned for years that price supports, subsidies, and tariffs only benefit, in the World bank’s words, “a few at the expense of a very large number.” They also noted that the best way to help agriculture is to let market prices reflect real conditions. Naturally, such suggestions drew only the wrath of more “progressive” thinkers.

The U.S. government, continuing the welfare-state programs of the New Deal, and European countries (particularly France), following the “enlightened” path of their own cradle-to-grave mentalities, have proudly proclaimed their allegiance to price supports and other farming subsidies as a cornerstone of their agricultural agendas. When pressed on the moral and economic wisdom of a course that takes wealth created by one group and uses it to prop up another, government officials and media mouthpieces can be counted on to charge, “Do you want all of the farms to go away and people to starve?” By adhering to such socialist dogma they have greatly contributed to starvation and the failure of farms elsewhere.

Risks and Rewards

There is no doubt that welfare-for-farmers is absurd. Those who choose to go into agriculture should be expected to take all the risks and enjoy all the rewards of their chosen occupation. But while earlier the left condemned the “evil” and “heartless” free agriculture market, today they scold the rich countries for aiding their farmers too well. No one yet has the courage or vision to call for an end to subsidies, but with their global consequences becoming clear, many self-styled advocates of the poor are urging the West to move away from a once-cherished pillar of the welfare-state agenda. This at least implies a concession to a more market-oriented approach.

Unfortunately, now comes the lesson that socialism breeds not only economic disorder, but also the power of political pull. Representative Larry Combest of Texas, chairman of the House Agricultural Committee, perfectly illustrated the atmosphere that has been fostered by a socialist farming policy: “This [farm bill] is for rural America. This is not for rural Mexico. This is not for rural Canada, and this is not for rural Europe.” Even in traditionally pro-market countries politicians have been hammered for so long to do “more” for farmers that they’ve decided to do precisely as they were told. And the world is united in its chagrin over the result.

It is certainly encouraging that more people are beginning to see the value of free and open markets and the dangers of government interference–even if George W. Bush does not. Observing the passage of the farm bill, ABC News analyst Terry Moran remarked that it pitted “free market rhetoric against political reality” and “reality won.” A more accurate analysis would be that the universal criticism of the President for signing this bill clearly shows that socialist “reality,” when transformed from rhetoric into public policy, is a tragic failure. America should take note and forthwith abandon all its welfare-state designs. When the planet’s “humanitarians” predictably lament, “What about the poor?” remind them that once upon a time they saw the answer to that question.

Scott McPherson is a freelance writer in Fairfax, Virginia.

She’s not actually going to grow any plums, but she’s going to be a “plum grower” nonetheless, and I really couldn’t be more proud.

To display such entrepreneurial spirit at her age is truly admirable. Of course, it helps that the U.S. government recently announced a program essentially to pay plum growers to not grow plums.

It seems there is a glut of plums and prunes in the United States, and the secretary of agriculture is doing something about it. The Office of Management and Budget has authorized the Department of Agriculture to spend $17 million to buy the sweet fruit from beleaguered growers and pay them $8.50 for every plum tree they are willing to uproot. By destroying the trees, there will be fewer plums on the market, and the growers will see higher prices for their product. QED.

My mother plans to plant plum seeds, then offer to the government a deal whereby she will overturn the hazardous future trees, raze the soil, and promise to never grow plums again. Each potential tree could garner her $8.50, and, destroyed in high numbers, that could mean plenty of extra cash in her pocketbook. She might even hire an employee to not grow plums with her.

One of the nicest aspects of the program, other than its pronounced inclination toward deforestation and soil erosion, is that the federally purchased prunes will be offered to charities and schools, a policy that will no doubt contribute mightily to the atmosphere of learning and erudition our school systems already keenly foster. There can be nothing quite so edifying as being locked in a public classroom filled with children who’ve just gorged themselves on federally subsidized prunes.

The prune buyback program may seem a strange way to run an economy, more akin to Stalin’s Soviet Union or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. But paying people to actually do the exact opposite of their chosen vocation is a tried and trusted mode of operation in the United States.

Since the venerated presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the U.S. government has spent roughly $596 billion on agricultural supports, 90 percent of which has gone to large-scale producers of five products: corn, rice, wheat, soy, and cotton—the “fabric of our lives.” The harrowed family farmer typically portrayed in heart-wrenching news broadcasts as the beneficiary of our “goodwill” rarely sees this booty. In fact, according to Chris Edwards and Tad DeHaven of the Cato Institute, “In 1999, the largest 7 percent of farms received 45 percent of all government subsidy payments. By contrast, the 76 percent of farms that are categorized as small received just 14 percent of subsidies.” Edwards and DeHaven also found that most farmers aren’t even in need of the socialist pork. With average household incomes calculated at $64,347 in 1999, which is “17 percent higher than the $54,842 average for all the US non-farm households,” farmers are far from the hay-chewing “land slaves” portrayed by propagandists such as John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. (See Chris Edwards and Tad DeHaven, “Farm Subsidies at Record Levels as Congress Considers New Farm Bill,” Cato Institute Briefing Paper No. 70, October 18, 2001, p. 7.)

Most farmers on the dole don’t even qualify for mention in one of Willie Nelson’s noble yet increasingly tedious Farm Aid concerts. While Willie and his artistic cohorts diligently ply their craft to help save the anachronistic “family farm,” politicians cozy up to agricultural lobbyists in Congress, manipulating a corrupt and unconstitutional system.

The interstate commerce clause of the Constitution was written as a way to prevent states from imposing tariffs on products from other states. The Founders intended it to act as a check on arbitrary state law that might harm trade between the states. However, since the days of FDR, it has been used as a pre-emptive tool, to control and manipulate any product going over state borders. It has given politicians license to shower ill-gotten plunder on anyone for any reason, as long as a majority in the Capital approves.

My mother grew up while FDR was in office, when this absurd tradition began. Perhaps it’s only fitting that she latch onto this anti-economic, unconstitutional free ride that the Department of Agriculture is offering. It’s the kind of socialistic elitism Roosevelt loved, the sort of New Deal thinking that has given Washington dominance over all that is left of the American free-enterprise system. She can now get paid to not produce plums. It’s a shame Washington politicians also couldn’t get paid to do absolutely nothing. We’d all be a lot better off.

P. Gardner Goldsmith is an independent journalist and screenwriter in New Hampshire.