American politics
Democracy in America
Patriotism and crop subsidies
How 'ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm?
Mar 8th 2011, 21:31 by W.W. | IOWA CITY
IN THIS chat with Ezra Klein, Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, offers a pandering defence of agricultural subsidies so thoroughly bereft of substance I began to fear that Mr Vilsack would be sucked into the vacuum of his mouth and disappear.
When Mr Klein first raises the subject of subsidies for sugar and corn, Mr Vilsack admirably says, "I admit and acknowledge that over a period of time, those subsidies need to be phased out." But not yet! Vilsack immediately thereafter scrambles to defend the injurious practice. Ethanol subsidies help to wean us off foreign fuels and dampen price volatility when there is no peace is the Middle East, Mr Vilsack contends. Anyway, he continues, undoing the economic dislocation created by decades of corporate welfare for the likes of ADM and Cargill will create economic dislocation. Neither of these points is entirely lacking in merit, but they at best argue for phasing out subsidies slowly starting now.
Mr Vilsack should have stopped here, since this is as strong as his case is ever going to be, but instead he goes on to argue that these subsidies sustain rural culture, which is a patriotic culture that honours and encourages vital military service:
[S]mall-town folks in rural America don’t feel appreciated. They feel they do a great service for America. They send their children to the military not just because it’s an opportunity, but because they have a value system from the farm: They have to give something back to the land that sustains them.
Mr Klein follows up sanely:
It sounds to me like the policy you’re suggesting here is to subsidize the military by subsidizing rural America. Why not just increase military pay? Do you believe that if there was a substantial shift in geography over the next 15 years, that we wouldn’t be able to furnish a military?
To which Mr Vilsack says:
I think we would have fewer people. There’s a value system there. Service is important for rural folks. Country is important, patriotism is important. And people grow up with that. I wish I could give you all the examples over the last two years as secretary of agriculture, where I hear people in rural America constantly being criticized, without any expression of appreciation for what they do do.
In the end, Mr Vilsack's argument comes down to the notion that the people of rural America feel that they have lost social status, and that subsidies amount to a form of just compensation for this injury. I don't think Mr Vilsack really believes that in the absence of welfare for farmers, the armed services would be hard-pressed to find young men and women willing to make war for the American state. He's using willingness-to-volunteer as proof of superior patriotism, and superior patriotism is the one claim to status left to those who have no other. As Julian Sanchez put it in this insightful post:
[A] lot of our current politics has less to do with actual policy disagreements than with resolving status anxieties. You can think of patriotism as a kind of status socialism—a collectivization of the means of self-esteem production. You don’t have to graduate from an Ivy or make a lot of money to feel proud or special about being an American; you don’t have to do a damn thing but be born here. Cultural valorization of “American-ness” relative to other status markers, then, is a kind of redistribution of psychological capital to those who lack other sources of it.
Mr Vilsack's retreat to the patriotism of rural Americans as justification for continued subsidies—subsidies that mostly enrich huge corporations—I think vindicates Mr Sanchez's claim that politics is largely a matter of creating and catering to status anxieties, while also demonstrating that the case for agricultural subsidies has hit rock bottom. Unfortunately, winning the intellectual debate over agricultural subsidies is far from sufficient to motivate politicians to begin opposing them in earnest. The combination of rural status anxiety and the lobbying heft of the agribusiness giants should be enough to keep laying the hurt on the world's poor farmers and grain consumers for a long time to come.
(Free exchange has more on this topic. Photo credit: Bloomberg News)
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I look forward to watching every 2012 presidential hopeful passing through Iowa kowtow at the Altar of Ethanol-- a strong candidate for the most damaging and indefensible government program in America.
Hope dies.
You know, I wouldn't mind that my home state of California gets to subsidize these "patriots" so much if we could just make the payments more transparent.
My suggestion is hand delivery of checks marked "Welfare from California" by some flaming gay men wearing assless chaps. How much longer do you think the subsidies would last then?
Ethanol subsidies for some, small American flags for others!
OneAegis,
That just might work.
It's worth noting though that there are plenty of California farmers that benefit from these direct subsidies as well. Cotton, corn, and rice are all major crops in Ca that receive federal subsidies. Every other kind of agriculture in the state (vegetables in the Salinas Valley, Citrus in the San Joaquin, etc.) also benefits from water prices that don't come anywhere near reflecting the engineering costs of delivery, much less the environmental damage incurred by water transfers.
As long as the U.S. Senate exists, rural Americans will be subsidized at the expense of everyone else. Tea Partiers in Lincoln still want their farm subsidies to go along with their Medicare and Social Security checks, deficit be damned.
"Unfortunately, winning the intellectual debate over agricultural subsidies is far from sufficient to motivate politicians to begin opposing them in earnest." If anything, WW understates the dysfunction of American democracy. In fact, winning the intellectual debate over anything typically (1) defines the superior policy solution and (2) earns you the 'elitist' label, paradoxically pushing the superior policy solution further from realization.
And if Pelosi, WW and common sense cannot end agribusiness welfare, red state senators, Vilsack and the Tea Party certainly won't. I'm afraid we are left with little but the pathetic hope for more Nixons in China. That, or OneAegis' solution.
And yet, he still can't shovel it as well as his boss.
Only 2% or so of the US population is directly employed by the agricultural sector. Rural family farms are a thing of the past. We need to stop giving corporate welfare to giant agribusinesses in the guise of helping out the poor farmer. It is akin to sending billions of foreign aid money to tyrannical dictators abroad under the pretext of feeding the world.
Julian's right, I think.
As a personal matter, and status anxiety, most people in farm country aren't farmers. Most people in farm country are more or less vassals to farmers, which means most of the rural and partriotic families Mr. Vilsack is describing are being kept from land ownership by the factoring of price subsidies into land prices.
Julian's right, I think.
As a personal matter, and status anxiety, most people in farm country aren't farmers. Most people in farm country are more or less vassals to farmers, which means most of the rural and partriotic families Mr. Vilsack is describing are being kept from land ownership by the factoring of price subsidies into land prices.
Julian's right, I think.
As a personal matter, and status anxiety, most people in farm country aren't farmers. Most people in farm country are more or less vassals to farmers, which means most of the rural and partriotic families Mr. Vilsack is describing are being kept from land ownership by the factoring of price subsidies into land prices.
@monkey
Vilsack is a Democrat and former governor of Iowa. Don't lump him together with Red State senators and the Tea Party. That's just dumb.
Will, since you live in Iowa, you should make the effort to talk to actual rural people. They are not as Vilsack (or rather, the lobbyists he parrots) would caricature them. Few of them own farms, and of those, few receive subsidies. The subsidies, as you note, go to the giant corporations the lobbyists of which wrote them into law. Ask a hundred people in the rural midwest what they think of ag subsidies, and I'll be shocked if you find five to defend them.
I won't dispute that some people take refuge in patriotism when other pursuits have disappointed them, but that happens in cities and suburbs too. I wonder if your, Sanchez's, and numerous other commentators' credulity with respect to this sort of lobbyist-constructed misapprehension of public opinion doesn't say more about you than about the public? Could it be that your idea of how much it must suck not to be a highly-educated opinionated blog dude colors your opinions of others, and perhaps makes you more apt to swallow pseudopsychoanalytic tall tales from those in authority?
I'm sorry you were mesmerized by Vilsack's sophistry, but there is a cure. Cui bono.
If we have to subsidize them could we at least redirect the subsidies to vegetables instead to help our health care costs?
Of course this isn't going to happen because most agricultural subsidies go to big agribusiness and not small farmers since agribusiness is rather weightier. Vegetable subsidies would probably help small and local farmers much more, at the expense of big agg and the dairy industry (which, while there are some small farmers in addition to the big brands, is still pretty concentrated).
Whenever I think of farm subsidies, especially in the context of Vilsack talking about a form of patriotism that can only be found in farm country, I think of this description of Major Major Major's father in book Catch-22:
"He was a farmer who firmly believed that government aid for anybody besides farmers was creeping socialism."
As others have mentioned, not everybody in rural America is a farmer.
There are better ways to boost the rural communities in America besides farm subsidies that mostly go to giant agribusinesses and massive landowners such as David Letterman, who received a 6-figure check from the government for not growing crops on his farmland.
Vilsack is right that rural Americans over-contribute (relative to their proportion of the population) to the military. Therefore, measures like the new GI bill that offers improved educational benefits for enlisted servicemen and women serve the dual benefits of better rewarding service as well as setting those rural men and women up for a college education that better prepares them for work in a 21st century economy.