Unintended Consequences

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

USDA buys food products from eligible vendors, then gives them away to schools and eligible poor people.

The purpose of the program: “The Agricultural Marketing Service’s Commodity Procurement Staff purchase a variety of food products in support of the National School Lunch Program and other food assistance programs. These purchases also help to stabilize prices* in agricultural commodity markets by balancing supply and demand.

*Euphemism for price supports, aka subsidy to food producers.

Lots of foods are available including raisins. Raisins? We need to create an artificial shortage to support higher prices for grape growers? Yes, except one of the growers is pissed the government forces him to hand over his crop and brought a Takings claim. The case went to the Supreme Court which ruled he didn’t have to pay the fine for failing to turn over his crop before he could bring a Constitutional challenge to the law requiring him to turn over his crop or pay a fine. The government didn’t pay for raisins, they took them, to feed the poor. Barak “Raisin Robin Hood” Obama.

The whole system is insane. We buy food and store it in warehouses to make food artificially expensive and therefore more profitable to producers, but then poor people can’t afford food so we truck it around the country and give it to them for free. Stop The Madness! Don’t buy the food, let the market decide how many producers can produce food and still be profitable, let Cub and Rainbow warehouse and ship it, let prices slip so poor people can afford it. The market will take care of everything if we just get the hell out of the way!

Why is that so hard to understand?

Joe Doakes

If you leave out the forced labor (so far) and use of food as a terror weapon, the similarity to the Soviet agriculture plans of the 1930s will make you pound your head on the desk.

 

4 thoughts on “Unintended Consequences

  1. Plus the market would help move producers from grapes (raisins) to crops the market demands, say hops.

  2. It’s worth noting that Robin Hood actually took not just from “the rich”, but rather “the rich who benefited from taxation.” So our President is not Barack “Robin Hood” Obama, but rather Barack “Sheriff of Nottinghham” Obama.

    To further illustrate the insanity of our food programs, we’re providing tons of dairy products to the poor, who are disproportionally (being disproportionately black and hispanic) lactose intolerant. Even the poor who can handle dairy routinely get far more government cheese and butter than they desire to eat–and hence you’ll find “gummint cheese” and butter in non-poor households because the poor are trading it for things they actually want.

    At a tremendous discount, say the kind that the poor would get for their food if the government wasn’t messing things up.

  3. As easy money goes, it is hard to beat farm subsidies.

    Farm subsidies seem to reveal the true state of politics — anything that benefits my constituents regardless of political affiliation is good, smart spending. Anything that benefits your constituents is pork.

    I believe it was PJ O’Rourke who said, “Farm policy can be explained. What it can’t be is believed.”

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