Preach it, brother Jim

Sayeth Mr Henley:

Good heavens. Three-quarters of a century of regulatory-state agriculture has left us with a system of subsidized corporate farms who deplete the soil, abuse animals and enjoy a coziness with state agents while the same state agents hassle independent operators and crusading eccentrics out of business. It’s as if, my man IOZ would say, there’s a pattern . . .

If you believe that extensive government regulation and “support” of American agriculture is worth it, you believe that the state bigfooting small farmers on behalf of large ones is a cost worth the benefits managed agriculture delivers. But there’s no pretending that the cost is some odd thing that somehow happened and can be yanked out of the structure. It’s a load-bearing pillar of the regulatory state.

Comments

It’s a load-bearing pillar of the regulatory state.

Uh, wouldn't that be the "corporate welfare" state, rather than the legendary "regulatory" state?

Posted by M. Bouffant | November 24, 2007 5:18 PM

Wow. Coming out against farm subsidies. Now that's a controversial position. Who's going to argue against that, besides farmers. And John Mellencamp.

Posted by Rickm | November 24, 2007 8:42 PM

M. Bouffant, regulations are what allow corporate welfare to exist. Pretending corporate welfare doesn't arise from regulation is what allows bad policies, like the one this post discusses, to exist in the first place.

Not all regulations result in corporate welfare, but ALL corporate welfare results from regulation.

Posted by DPT | November 24, 2007 8:44 PM

"Wow. Coming out against farm subsidies. Now that's a controversial position. Who's going to argue against that, besides farmers. And John Mellencamp."

More people than you think. I live in MA and I've met plenty of people who've never farmed in their lives who think farm subsidies 'make sure we have enough food to eat'.

Posted by DPT | November 24, 2007 8:47 PM

Pretending corporate welfare doesn't arise from regulation is what allows bad policies, like the one this post discusses, to exist in the first place.

And is pretending that "regulation," rather than lobbyists & the Congresses they own, is the cause of corporate welfare doing anything to improve things?

Posted by M. Bouffant | November 24, 2007 10:13 PM

"And is pretending that "regulation," rather than lobbyists & the Congresses they own, is the cause of corporate welfare doing anything to improve things"

Circular reasoning. No one would buy a congressman or a senator if the congressman or senator did have something worth buying and offering it for sale. And it's not for corporations alone anymore. The non-profit charitable world is also in on and part of the racket. They also have their bought and paid for politicians.

Posted by cubanbob | November 24, 2007 10:56 PM

M. Bouffant, regulations are the means to the end of corporate welfare. I think I can acknowledge that without denying special interests are the actors in that case, don't you?

Posted by DPT | November 24, 2007 11:13 PM

One of the best lines of all times is after a local factory hog farm announced that their new odor control system cut the odor in half, a local resident said: "Wow, what used to smell like 60,000 hogs now only smells like 30,000 hogs"

Posted by REI | November 25, 2007 6:59 AM

regulations are what allow corporate welfare to exist.

No - corporations are what allow corporate welfare to exist! Either that, or money. Abolish either one, and presto - problem solved!

Of course you end up with a lot of other problems. Maybe even as many as you'd get if you abolished the "regulatory state", whatever that means.

Posted by brooksfoe | November 25, 2007 9:30 AM

I mean, just to clarify: what on earth does this mean?

It’s a load-bearing pillar of the regulatory state.

Is Henley saying that if we end farm subsidies, the FDA and FCC will come crashing down too? What is he trying to say? It sounds like that old Marxist talk about how the contradictions of the business cycle must inevitably lead to the collapse of the international capitalism system in toto, and blah ti blah ti blah.

Posted by brooksfoe | November 25, 2007 9:54 AM

I'm always surprised at how quickly libertarians tend to arrive at the conclusion that because something is currently not working or working imperfectly, the correct response is to jettison any attempt at doing that thing. You see it again and again and again.

Posted by Freddie | November 25, 2007 10:27 AM

McArdle is quoting here from someone who characterizes U.S. foreign policy as a protection racket in which we use our military strength to force other nations to buy our Treasury bonds. There isn't any reason to expect Henley's comments on agricultural policy to achieve a higher level of rationality.

Posted by y81 | November 25, 2007 11:42 AM

Brooksfoe, Freddie, M. Bouffant,

You all need to step away from the warm, fluffy regulatory state that exists only in your mind and learn how the regulatory state actually works.

A article by William Saletan of Polyface organic farms would be a good place to start your education Bold emphasis in blockquotes is mine.

Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal

But what about dressing a couple of animals a year in the backyard? How can that be compared to a ConAgra or Tyson facility? In the eyes of the government, the two are one and the same. Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor.

So the regulations are rigid and see no difference between the tiny farm the author has and the big companies Tyson and ConAgra. Regulations always give an advantage to big companies because they can afford the staff to deal with them.

Small companies, not so much.
.
Saletan continues
.

OK, so I take my animals and load them onto a trailer for the first time in their life to send them up the already clogged interstate to the abattoir... After the animals are processed, I return to the facility hoping to retrieve my meat.

When I return home to sell these delectable packages, the county zoning ordinance says that this is a manufactured product because it exited the farm and was reimported as a value-added product, thereby throwing our farm into the Wal-Mart category, another prohibition in agricultural areas. Just so you understand this, remember that an on-farm abattoir was illegal, so I took the animals to a legal abattoir, but now the selling of said products in an on-farm store is illegal.

The regulatory state you folks love have made it impossible for this small producer to sell his own product at his farm. It has cleared the competitive field for the large companies and made it impossible for the small producer to compete.

Regulations always provide a competitive advantage to larger companies.

If you want to keep a level playing field between big and small companies you need to limit regulations to the ones that are critically important for life, health, and safety issues and get rid of the rest.

Posted by TJIT | November 25, 2007 3:10 PM

But the destructive power regulations have on the small producer don't stop at the above example.

Read the article and find out how it impacts things like on-farm seminars, employing interns, and

collaborative marketing

As soon as our farm offers a single item — just one — that is not produced here, we have become a Wal-Mart. Period. That means a business license, which is basically another layer of taxes on our gross sales. The business license requires a commercial entrance, which on our country road is almost impossible to acquire due to sight-distance requirements and width regulations

Even if we could comply with all of the above requirements, a retail outlet carries with it a host of additional regulations.

We must provide designated handicapped parking, government-approved toilet facilities (our four household bathrooms in the two homes located 50 feet away from the retail building do not count) — and it can’t be a composting toilet. We must offer x-number of parking spaces. Folks, it just goes on and on, ad nauseum, and all for simply trying to help a neighbor sell her potatoes or extra pumpkins at Thanksgiving.

Lovely system the supporters of the existing regulatory state have saddled us with.

Posted by TJIT | November 25, 2007 3:37 PM

TJIT, most of the regulations you cite (e.g., number of entrances to commercial facilities) are county or town-level regulations. If you object to county-level parking regulations, then your objection is not to Leviathan, but to the very idea of government.

And if your plan is to allow people to slaughter animals and sell the meat without government inspection in any neighborhood in America, I'm definitely not with you.

Posted by y81 | November 25, 2007 7:40 PM

Brooksfoe, Freddie, M. Bouffant,
You all need to step away from the warm, fluffy regulatory state that exists only in your mind and learn how the regulatory state actually works....

The regulatory state you folks love

I never claimed to love regulation. I don't think it follows from the fact that regulation is imperfect that we should abandon regulation.

Posted by Freddie | November 25, 2007 7:49 PM

y81 in blockquotes

most of the regulations you cite (e.g., number of entrances to commercial facilities) are county or town-level regulations. If you object to county-level parking regulations, then your objection is not to Leviathan, but to the very idea of government.

In other words crushing small business and empowering large corporations is ok if local regulations do it.

And if your plan is to allow people to slaughter animals and sell the meat without government inspection in any neighborhood in America, I'm definitely not with you.

Nice cherry picking tex. You blew right past the part noting that the regulations prevented him from selling the meat he had processed at the USDA inspected plant.

You also blew right by the fact that he can't even sell a neighbors crafts without getting entangled in a bunch of regulations that would make the enterprise unprofitable.

More power to you if you like to see lots of regulations.

But please don't pretend that all of them are necessary or continue to ignore that their most frequent impact is to provide a competitive advantage to larger companies.

Posted by TJIT | November 25, 2007 8:28 PM

"their most frequent impact is to provide a competitive advantage to larger companies."

TJIT, the last thing they'd admit is that that's the reason so many regulations exist in the first place..

And, even his cherry picking is obtuse: "And if your plan is to allow people to slaughter animals and sell the meat without government inspection in any neighborhood in America, I'm definitely not with you." completely ignores the many multi-million pound 'inspected' beef/meat/processed foods recalls, and millions more cases of food poisoning from 'regulated' establishments..

http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=beef+recalls

http://barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu/

Posted by Mark E Hoffer | November 25, 2007 10:24 PM

And, even his cherry picking is obtuse: "And if your plan is to allow people to slaughter animals and sell the meat without government inspection in any neighborhood in America, I'm definitely not with you." completely ignores the many multi-million pound 'inspected' beef/meat/processed foods recalls, and millions more cases of food poisoning from 'regulated' establishments..

OK, to describe someone as obtuse and then use that reasoning is a pretty amazing case of throwing stones in a glass house. The fact that tainted meat gets through the regulatory system proves... what, exactly? That regulation is hopeless and we should give up? What about the many more pounds of tainted food that do not slip by? And do you apply that thinking to any other situation? Sometimes, system x fails, so we should abandon system x? Again, this thinking that, because a government venture operates less than perfectly, we should abolish any attempt at that venture... it's very weird.

Posted by Freddie | November 25, 2007 10:53 PM

Freddie,

Saying that having regulations that require a person to spend tens of thousands of dollars in order to sell a craft item is overkill and is not justified from a cost benefit standpoint is not the same as saying there should be no regulations at all.

Please don't confuse the two concepts.

Posted by TJIT | November 25, 2007 11:22 PM

Meadow: The individual can be completely crushed by the state.
Tony S: New Jersey?

TJIT,
Mr Saleten is right of course. The re-emergence of organic farms where everthing is done on site poses a challenge to the existing regulatory regime. That said, if we are libertarian and all into personal responsibility and all that, what kind of insurance policy does Mr Saleten need in order to slaughter on site? Can he afford it? Should he be forced to carry such a policy? I mean if he kills someone by accident via ecoli infection and promptly declares chapter 11, because he does not have insurance, how is that fair? Is that the cost of living in a "truly free market". I donno. These regulations didn't just come about because some fat cat paid off a bunch of legislators in 1948 to pass a law that stops little guys. A lot of these regs come out of the experience of death and misery. So who pays when murphy's law goes into effect?
These things we assume are simple are often not.

Posted by Northern Observer | November 26, 2007 11:31 AM

Heaven help me, I agree with NO.

There was a discussion back at AI some time ago about TSA regs on liquids and how stupid they are, when somebody pointed out that those making the regs needed them to be applied by low-level employees of dubious intelligence. From that starting point, the conclusion that the regs must be 1) bizarre and inexplicable to those with common sense, 2) inappropriate for many situations, and 3) rigidly enforced even when inappropriate, seems inescapable.

Most regs are the same way; it's tough to distinguish between Wal-Mart and the little shop in a practical way on paper. If you try to do that, you need an army of lawyers to navigate the rules and half the time you'll find yourself on the wrong end of a loophole. But if you leave lots of discretion to low-level enforcers, then you create little dictators with the ability to play power games just for their own amusement. And if you keep the regs simple and easy to understand with a minimum of discretion, then you wind up with corner shop = Wal-Mart.

Yes, the result is both predictable and stupid. But doing better is not as easy as you'd hope.

Posted by Rob Lyman | November 26, 2007 12:29 PM

Those quotes TJIT supplied read like some of the entries to a "That's Outrageous!" column in Reader's Digest during a slow month -- same factually-based anecdotes selected and then blown up to the largest scale possible through aggressive language. Here, the comparison to Wal-Mart is typical of this rhetorical style: pick the biggest, baddest entity possible for the comparison, and then lament, "How can we compete?" Answer: same way as that locally-owned hardware store four blocks over, stupid.

In point of fact, absent any regulatory state at all, economies of scale will always favor the larger business over the smaller, and the smaller business that succeeds (and in time, typically becomes large) must be correspondingly aggressive to navigate around the limitations this will place on his operations. Why would the regulatory state be any different? Special limitations for purposes of human health, safety, and accommodation will always place a higher burden on the smaller operation for the same reason that his or her materials and overhead costs will be a higher portion of operating budget.

As someone already noted, most of the truly difficult limitations on small business come from state and local/municipal zoning ordinances and business laws. Fortunately, these are also the ones an entreupreneur can most easily research, navigate around, or seek to have changed (some states being more obnoxious than others). But, there are typically two types of would-be entreupreneurs in such case (and I've witnessed both types): those who research, organize, and lobby, and those who simply sit back and whine that the status quo isn't already perfect.

Posted by anony-mouse | November 26, 2007 2:03 PM

I got this far:

A article by William Saletan

and then stopped.

How is Lord Saletan an authority on anything? He's no more credible than I am, just better-paid.

I'm interested to hear how public health and food safety is assured after we do away with all agricultural regulation. The "invisible hand" of the free market seems to rarely be washed before it handles our food.

I'm also interested in hearing how absent agricultural subsidies Big Agribusiness wouldn't still have killed off the "family farmer."

Posted by liberalrob | November 26, 2007 4:45 PM

I see now it was a (possibly Freudian) slip; the article wasn't by William "Lord" Saletan but by Joel Salatin. That makes a little more sense.

Posted by liberalrob | November 26, 2007 4:50 PM

Northern Observer,

You are still blowing right past the point that he can't even sell a neighbors craft doll without spending tens of thousands of dollars to comply with additional regulations.

As I said above it is your privilege to wish for a large regulatory state.

But don't ignore the fact that it provides a competitive advantage to larger enterprises.

And don't be so naive as to believe all of the regulations exist to protect human health.

Posted by TJIT | November 26, 2007 10:30 PM

Rob Lyman,

Fair points. I think regulations need to be justified on a fairly rigorous cost benefit basis.

The situation on liquids is another interesting case in point. They are chasing down liquids yet still managing to not detect a substantial amount of the simulated bombs the TSA runs through the inspection stations.

Not something that gives one a great deal of confidence in the effectiveness of the regulations.

Posted by TJIT | November 26, 2007 10:36 PM

anony-mouse in blockquotes

factually-based anecdotes selected and then blown up to the largest scale possible through aggressive language. Here, the comparison to Wal-Mart is typical of this rhetorical style: pick the biggest, baddest entity possible for the comparison, and then lament, "How can we compete?" Answer: same way as that locally-owned hardware store four blocks over, stupid.

Did you bother to read the linked article? Do you not understand that their might be some difference between a hardware store and a low sales volume rural produce / craft market?

In point of fact, absent any regulatory state at all, economies of scale will always favor the larger business over the smaller,

That explains how IBM continues to dominate the OS market and how United continues to be the most profitable airline, not Southwest.

As someone already noted, most of the truly difficult limitations on small business come from state and local/municipal zoning ordinances and business laws.

So over regulation, rent seeking behavior and destruction of business activity is ok if it done on a local basis?

Fortunately, these are also the ones an entreupreneur can most easily research, navigate around, or seek to have changed

Apparently you have never had to deal with a homeowners association or zoning board. The idea that local regulations are easier to navigate around is not very well supported.

Posted by TJIT | November 26, 2007 10:51 PM