Farm Subsidies

Farming is a romantic career. The rugged individual making something from the earth and his sweat. The problem is that it no longer makes a lot of sense to have as many farmers as we do. Corporate farming may not be romantic, but it is efficient.

The Washington Post’s Sarah Cohen reported that federal taxpayers shelled out $1.1 billion to dead farmers between 1999 and 2005.

And unlike Pentagon purchases, a substantial number of these payments are made without review. Reported Cohen:

In a selection of 181 cases from 1999 to 2005, the Government Accountability Office found that officials approved payments without any review 40 percent of the time.

The report cited a 1,900-acre soybean and corn farm in Illinois that collected $400,000 on behalf of an owner who lived in Florida before his death in 1995. The company did not notify the government of the death but certified each year that the dead shareholder, who owned 40 percent of the company, was “actively engaged” in managing the farm.

Farm subsidies are a disaster. They artificially keep in farming people who do not need to be farming, which increases supply, which drives prices down, which increases the demand for subsidies.

Farm subsidies endanger the environment by keeping land as farms that could revert to forests and the like. The subsidies increase the use of pesticides.

Farm subsidies also hurt foreign policy, by blocking out Third World countries. Sugar and ethanol imports are damaged by subsidies and in the case of foreign ethanol a 50-cent-a-gallon tax. (Duty.)