Axing the Subsidies...
Imagine you're in a car being driven by your best friend. This person's whole life has been about cars -- he loves everything about them, dreams about them, never stops talking about them. He's not a very good driver, though - but he gets really defensive if you bring it up - if you even look like you'll bring it up. So... presently you're both in the car and he's driving 95 mph and happens to be heading towards a cliff. Do you encourage him to go faster? Do you tell him what a good driver he is? Would this be doing either of you a favor at this point?
It seems obvious that we won't make farmers more competitive by taking the pressure off of them to be competitive, by protecting them from competition. But that's what subsidies do. We're not shocked that some farmers are throwing tantrums over the current proposal to cut some subsidies -- they're like the car nut driving us over a cliff and they're defensive as heck about their inability to compete.
My grandfather always said if someone calls you a donkey, laugh -- but if a lot of people call you a donkey, you'd best buy a saddle and sell rides. That was his way of saying listen to the market -- it tells you what everyone values and how you stack up compared to that. He'd say you have to work hard at the right things -- just working hard isn't enough.
The vast majority of us figure that out pretty early on in our endeavors to eek out a living. So what gives some farmers the illusion that they have a birthright to farm? What gives some of them the audacity to demand that the rest of us have our hard-earned dollars forcibly diverted away from our childrens' college education and other more useful and valued purposes -- just so they can take them and dump them into a black hole of uncompetitiveness?
My family's history was built on agricultural efforts in Maine. We don't operate dairy farms and apple orchards anymore. Now we are bankers, artists, educators, marketers, lawyers and computer geeks. Living in Kanasas, I have great friends whose families once made -- or continue to make -- their living from farming wheat, sorghum, corn and other ag products. But they aren't farmers themselves. They're entrepreneurs, doctors, machine shop workers, firemen, educators, and so on... Where would this country be if all of those bright energetic people had been forced to stay in farming?
I care a lot about all of them. I love my kids and my younger brothers, too. And I have the same message for all of them: a life worth living means connecting with reality (the world as it is, not how you want it be) and constructively dealing with it so you can apply your unique gifts and talents to add real value to your family, your community, your country, your world. Add real value -- not the illusion of value. Not take value away from others. Add real value. Value happens to be defined by all those individuals that make up your family, your community, your country, your world -- that is, value is not defined by you.
That makes for hard work in this day and age -- because the very freedom and prosperity that allows for an uncomprehensible myriad of specialization out there in the global markets makes it quite difficult for you to find your place within it. But that's what you have to do -- just like the rest of us. And noone else is responsible for getting it done for you.
"There is perhaps no more poignant grief than that arising from a sense of how useful one might have been to one's fellow men and of one's gifts having been wasted. That in a free society nobody has the duty to see that a man's talents are properly used, that nobody has claim to an opportunity to use his special gifts, and that, unless he himself finds such opportunity, they are likely to be wasted, is perhaps the gravest reproach directed against a free system and the source of the bitterest resentment. The consciousness of possessing certain potential capacities naturally leads to the claim that it is somebody else's duty to use them.
[...] The necessity of finding a sphere of usefulness, an appropriate job, ourselves is the hardest discipline that a free society imposes on us. It is, however, inseperable from freedom, since nobody can assure each man that his gifts will be properly used unless he has the power to coerce others to use them.
[...] It is of the essence of a free society that a man's value and remuneration depend not on capacity in the abstract but on success in turning it into concrete service which is useful to others who can reciprocate. And the chief aim of freedom is to provide both the opportunity and the inducement to insure maximum use of knowledge that an individual can acquire.[...]" -- F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty
There have been times in history when societies have believed so passionately in an indivudual's right to be free from the coercion of others that a lot of people were willing to sacrifice their lives to achieve and maintain it for the rest of us who have benefitted greatly. They knew that without freedom, the human race is doomed to extinction. Freedom doesn't guarantee anything but opportunity. But if you work hard, listen to the market, become a life-long discoverer and learner, you probably will succeed.
Let's get rid of all this subsidization, this coddling mentality we've developed that is leading us down the path of being perpetually parented into extinction.
