Combine a Midwestern drought with pointless ethanol mandates, and the
supplies of corn inevitably dwindle, driving prices sky high.
Politicians like Sen. Claire McCaskill,
Missouri Democrat, are citing the crop crisis as an excuse to ram
through a near-$1 trillion farm bill. While a bit of that cash might
find its way to a small farmer, the bulk of the loot will be transferred
to individuals who are anything but poor. Like the bank bailouts and
TARP, the farm bill illustrates the capture of the legislative process
by special interests.
The last farm bill in 2008 was the focus of $173.5 million in lobbying expenditure, according to a report released Tuesday by Food & Water Watch. This is all money spent on what the Mercatus Center’s Matthew Mitchell calls “unproductive entrepreneurship” where people are organizing and expending their talent to become rent seekers, and the end result is wealth redistribution, not wealth creation. Real entrepreneurship innovates in ways that are socially useful. Cronyism diverts resources — both money and talent — into a system that rewards privileges to favored groups. In the case of the 2008 farm bill, recipients of subsidies of $30,000 or more had an average household income of $210,000.
Mr. Mitchell argues that “government-granted privilege is an extraordinarily destructive force” because it not only results in a misallocation of resources and slower growth, it undermines civil society and the legitimacy of government by providing a rich soil for corruption.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jul/19/crop-cronyism/
The last farm bill in 2008 was the focus of $173.5 million in lobbying expenditure, according to a report released Tuesday by Food & Water Watch. This is all money spent on what the Mercatus Center’s Matthew Mitchell calls “unproductive entrepreneurship” where people are organizing and expending their talent to become rent seekers, and the end result is wealth redistribution, not wealth creation. Real entrepreneurship innovates in ways that are socially useful. Cronyism diverts resources — both money and talent — into a system that rewards privileges to favored groups. In the case of the 2008 farm bill, recipients of subsidies of $30,000 or more had an average household income of $210,000.
Mr. Mitchell argues that “government-granted privilege is an extraordinarily destructive force” because it not only results in a misallocation of resources and slower growth, it undermines civil society and the legitimacy of government by providing a rich soil for corruption.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jul/19/crop-cronyism/
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