The Gaming Den

Normally, I'm a pretty protectionist kind of guy--I want jobs to stay in America where they're helping American people. However, after reading about the United States' agricultural subsidies and our protectionist policies, it really seems that the consumer is getting the short end of the stick here. Big Corn eats up a fair chunk of our tax dollars, and anti-competitive practices lead to stagnation and over-farming.

Seems like this is one of the cases where less government would help society. Or am I mistaken?

Actually, even without corn subsidies the US would still produce more corn than the rest of the world. US crops floods third world markets and ruin subsistence farming by eliminating their cash crops.

The subsidies were started to keep a supply of farms and farmers available for food production when prices crashed in the 30s, leading not to scarcity, but farmers competing with past years' productions on the open market.

Today they're enshrined benefits that rich people get for owning valuable land or support large corporations. As money == speech in the US Supreme Court, those subsidies aren't going anywhere soon.

People say Democrats are like Republicans on this, but actually this merely maps to urban vs rural... And while rural Democrats side with Republicans on the issue, there are in fact urban Democrats.

-Crissa

I was under the impression that American agriculture would collapse in a week if it wasn't subsidized. Not because American farms are in bad shape, but because we are so successful at farming that produce has such a high supply to be pretty much infinite (we DO have a finite amount of food in this country, but when the amount is higher than the amount of food everyone in the world could possibly eat, it might as well be infinite for pricing reasons).

Simply put, due to the massive amount of supply and due to farming is one of the few completely open markets that exist (which means that the buyers name their price and the farmers pretty much have to take it or not sell their crops this year, completely free markets tend to be really bad for producers in that respect), it can get real ugly real quick.

Also, one of the major plant seed companies is pushing to have laws made to make it illegal to save your seeds from year to year, and are making all their products nonviable past the first generation to make it so farmers have to buy their seed every year. They will already sue you if seed from a farmer's field gets on your property and you don't destroy it.

Did I mention that the current ag bill expires next year? Yeah, health care will be nowhere NEAR as ugly as Ag next year (And we won't have the comedy of a democrat pushing a bill that the republicans supported ten years ago but now hate for some retarded reason, this is going to be REAL dirty.)

Yeah, said seed company was in court trying to prove that under the Bush admin. they had really done their due diligence with GMO sugar beets. The thing was, they might not have - not that anyone knows any particular reason sugar beets will take over the world.

But their last argument in court was, 'but we didn't make any non-GMO seeds for the crop next year! That means 95% of the crop can't be planted!'

The Judge did not like that answer, and injunctioned them from planting the seeds again next year.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:The subsidies were started to keep a supply of farms and farmers available for food production when prices crashed in the 30s, leading not to scarcity, but farmers competing with past years' productions on the open market.

The subsidies that caused the price system to become what it is today were largely established in the Nixon era.

The legal basis for subsidies were implemented in the 30s.

Specific subsidies? They've been added over time, yes. It's not like the current ethanol subsidies were created during the Nixon era.

-Crissa