All Posts Tagged With: "farm subsidies"

U.S. Agricultural Programs: Who Pays?

E. C. Pasour, Jr. is professor emeritus of agricultural and resource economics at North Carolina State University. He is coauthor with Randal R. Rucker of Plowshares and Pork Barrels: The Political Economy of Agriculture (Independent Institute, 2005). The Economist labeled the recently enacted 2008 farm bill “A Harvest of Disgrace” (May 24, 2008). The five-year [...]

1Nov2008 | E.C. Pasour Jr. | 1 comment | Continued

Eating Disorder: How Governments Raise Food Prices

Higher food prices may be frustrating Americans, but they are literally killing people in the least industrialized parts of the world. Hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people—who live close to starvation even in good years—are facing malnutrition and chronic hunger. The absolute poorest are facing death. In the 12 months leading to March [...]

1Sep2008 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 1 comment | Continued

Dead Men Farming

By now you’ve probably heard that a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report states: From 1999 through 2005, the USDA “paid $1.1 billion in farm payments in the names of 172,801 deceased individuals. . . . 40 percent went to those who had been dead for three or more years, and 19 percent to those [...]

1Nov2007 | John Stossel | 0 comments | Continued

Welfare for the Rich

Advocates of the free market—including those considered “right-wing” and “conservative”—believe it is wrong to violate property rights. Consequently, they oppose egalitarian measures to steal from the rich and give to the poor. Such “income redistribution” represents naked theft and epitomizes the Founding Fathers’ fears of unfettered democracy. At the same time, champions of laissez faire [...]

1Apr2007 | Robert P. Murphy | 10 comments | Continued

The New Sweden

Waldemar Ingdahl is director of Eudoxa, a liberal think tank in Stockholm, Sweden. The European Social Model is being heavily discussed in Europe. Some still laud it, but its problems are obvious, with low economic growth, an aging population coupled with “pay-as-you-go” pension systems, and widespread persisting unemployment. In Sweden we have already solved this [...]

1Mar2007 | Waldemar Ingdahl | 5 comments | Continued

The Origin of American Farm Subsidies

In the United States how did we go from having no role for the federal government in farming to having government intertwined in all aspects of farming from planting to harvesting to selling crops? The Constitution is clear on the subject. Article 1, Section 8, provides no role for the federal government in regulating American [...]

1Apr2006 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 0 comments | Continued

The Tobacco-Quota Buyout: More Legal Plunder

E. C. Pasour, Jr., is professor emeritus of agricultural and resource economics, North Carolina State University. Critics of tobacco use (and others) have been calling for an end to all government support to the industry for several decades. Now, under the corporate-tax bill passed by Congress last October, owners of tobacco quotas and farmers who [...]

1Feb2005 | E.C. Pasour Jr. | 2 comments | Continued

Ending Farm Subsidies Wouldn’t Help the Third World?

Talks by the 146 members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) collapsed last fall over trade-liberalization disputes between rich and poor countries. The biggest bone of contention was the extent to which the “first world”—mainly Europe, the United States, and Japan—were willing to slash their huge farm subsidies. More than 20 developing countries, including Brazil, [...]

1Apr2004 | E.C. Pasour Jr. | 5 comments | Continued

Feeling Their Oats

How inspiring it was to see nearly two dozen representatives of the poorest nations’ governments walk out of September’s World Trade Organization meeting to protest the rich countries’ subsidies to farmers. I don’t say this lightly. Governments rarely inspire anything in me. But here was a group of governments that finally put diplomatic niceties aside [...]

1Dec2003 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Socialism in Retreat

Free-market economists have argued for decades that interventionist government policies inadvertently lead to negative long-term consequences that far outweigh the perceived benefits. This has resulted, of course, in cries from the political left that advocates of capitalism care nothing about the indigent, needy, or otherwise downtrodden. So it is with bittersweet satisfaction that one sees [...]

1Oct2002 | Scott McPherson | 3 comments | Continued

Plum Deal

At 78, my mother has decided to embark on a new career. She’s going to become a plum grower. 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 [...]

1Jul2002 | P. Gardner Goldsmith | 0 comments | Continued

Farm Frolics

Democrats love capitalism,” charged U.S. Senator Phil Gramm of Texas during last year’s debate over tax cuts, “but they hate capitalists.”1 It is fair to say that Gramm’s analysis is on target—if only he would admit the corresponding truth in his criticism: that Republicans love capitalists but hate capitalism—particularly when it comes to their farming [...]

1May2002 | Scott McPherson | 0 comments | Continued

A Sense of Community Contradicts the Logic of the Market?

On September 8, 2001, distinguished New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis joined the ranks of those who claim both to appreciate the ways in which freedom and competition produce greater prosperity and to think that we cannot have civilized communities coexisting with that freedom. These contradictory claims were brought to the fore in his mind [...]

1Jan2002 | Aeon J. Skoble | 0 comments | Continued

End the Farm Dole Once and for All

A new program to require the U.S. Department of Agriculture to pay the cost of inspecting meat from emus and ostriches. A plan to spend $200 million to buy surplus cranberries, black-eyed peas, and other crops. A $100 million proposal for payments to producers of cottonseed. At this writing (June), these were among a bundle [...]

1Sep2000 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | Continued

Regulatory Extortion

Thomas DiLorenzo is a professor of economics at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland. This article is based on a presentation prepared for the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s conference, “Austrian Economics and the Financial Markets,” last September in Toronto. In 1978 Michael Jensen and William Meckling, writing in the Financial Analysts Journal, offered an extraordinarily gloomy [...]

1Mar2000 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 8 comments | Continued

Monster

Rule No. 1 for slaying the Hydra: slay it. Don’t just cut off one—or even a few—of its heads. That’s not good enough: the head might grow back. Kill it dead. How many times do we need to be taught that lesson before we learn it? During the presidency of Ronald Reagan the Department of [...]

1Feb1999 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Ax Business Welfare and Privatize Social Security

Doug Bandow, a nationally syndicated columnists, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author and editor of several books, including Tripwire: Korea and U.S. Foreign Policy in a Changed World. The president and Congress have promised a balanced budget by 2002, but a recent poll found that just 17 percent of Americans [...]

1Mar1998 | Doug Bandow | 0 comments | Continued
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