At 10:26 AM 8/1/01 -0700 Nick Arnett wrote:
>Who says food becoming too cheap is the reason for the vote? Certainly not
>the Washington Post.
>
>The article is here:
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13194-2001Jul31.html
Its admittedly hard to see, but here is the relevant quote:
"But Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who chairs the Agriculture Committee, urged
the Senate to reject Lugar's alternative as insufficient to the needs of
farmers hurt by falling exports, *depressed crop prices* and rising costs
for fuel and fertilizer." (emphasis added)
>It says nothing about food being too cheap. Democrats are arguing for
>greater agricultural subsidies, which are aimed at supporting farmers
>*without* the market having to bear the cost.
Do you care to back this up? Almost every agriculture subsidy I have ever
seen has the explicit goal of raising agriculture prices, from paying
farmers to keep land fallow, to artificially boosting demand for
agriculture products that never get used, to imposing 40% tariffs on many
agricultural imports.
Consider just one agricultural program, the Northeast Dairy Compact. This
subsidy has the explicit goal of raising the price of milk, as anyone
reading through the lines on their own website can easily determine.
http://www.dairycompact.org
> John's suggestion is
>illogical, since he would have us believe that higher farm subsidies would
>make food more expensive. The whole philosophy behind farm subsidies is
>that it keeps the farmers producing crops that would otherwise become
>scarce, leading to long-term prices rises.
Actually, it is your position that is illogical. You are warning of
scarcity at a time when we are producing more food than we can use. It
takes a very interesting sort of logic to argue that having too much of
something poses an immediate danger of having too little. By this logic,
we can never have enough of anything.
Moreover, why does this logic not apply to other industries? This country
would grind to a halt without lightbulbs, automobiles, or telephones. Do
we need price supports for each of these to ensure that the market will
*always* supply us with an adequate amount of lightbulbs, automobiles and
telephones? Is this country threatened by an oversupply of lightbulbs
that has made lighting too cheap?
In fact, is there any evidence that farmers have *ever* failed to produce
enough food? I encourage you to find examples. I'd just point out that
a gentleman by the name of Amartya Sen tried to find examples, and when he
basically failed, he won a Nobel Prize for it.
Has anybody noticed an emergency shortage of food this year? Hmmmmm?
Yet, the Democrats apparently feel the need to start spending large sums of
additional money on subsidies!
JDG - Who notes that you can never find a supporter of subsidies producing
a cost-benefit analysis, trading off benefits for farmers vs. costs to the
poor.
__________________________________________________________
John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - ICQ #3527685
We are products of the same history, reaching from Jerusalem and
Athens to Warsaw and Washington. We share more than an alliance.
We share a civilization. - George W. Bush, Warsaw, 06/15/01
