A New Approach - To Finally End an Old Farm Bill Problem

This President Had the Right Idea

The Farm Bill is a bane of we Conservatives’ existence - and Reality-based policy making. It is a relic of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)’s horrendously failed New Deal - a top-down, central-planning nightmare mess.

And over the last eighty-plus years, FDR’s heinous domestic policy has gone global. A worldwide farm market has arisen. We no longer just grow for ourselves. We sell all over - and they sell to us.

And our Farm Bill - which warps our market - has warped the world’s as well. FDR helped beget an eight-decade-long international regulatory arms race. Other produce-producing nations saw our lattice-work panoply of tariffs and subsidies - and felt compelled to match them. And then exceed them.

Round and round we go. Myriad nations outdo our government interference in the marketplace - so we outdo theirs. Lather, rinse, repeat. So what we now have is a global lattice-work panoply of tariffs and subsidies. A thicket that grows ever thicker - as each next government tries to outdo the last.

We take our swing every half decade - when our heinous Farm Bill comes up for Congressional renewal. A $1 trillion redux passed last year.

We Conservatives tried then to do what we always try to do - unilaterally kill it. And we were just as successful then as we always have been - not at all.

So let’s try something new, shall we?

We’ve spent the better part of a century erecting ever-higher walls of trade impediment. And watching the world’s nations do the same. It would seem we need to work together to tear down those walls.

Here’s a start of that deconstruction.

Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla., reintroduced a bill Friday that encourages the (Barack Obama) administration to target foreign sugar subsidies. Under the “Zero-for-Zero” plan, U.S. sugar policy would also be rolled back in exchange for the elimination of foreign programs, which Yoho says are distorting world prices and inhibiting a free market.

Congressman Yoho is, of course, absolutely correct. We’ve been “distorting world prices and inhibiting a free market” for decades - and on oh-so-much-more than merely sugar.

Here’s hoping the Administration makes this move - and on oh-so-much-more than merely sugar.

It’s way past time we end this fossilized facet of FDR’s New Deal. Both here - and abroad.

Editor's Note: This first appeared in Red State.