http://opinion.latimes.com/…

The U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t want to test more than 1% of cattle for mad-cow disease, and it doesn’t want anybody else to do it either. Who cares about customers and the companies that might want to please them? The USDA won its appellate round in court; justices ruled that the agency had the authority to stop beef producer Creekstone Farms from testing under a nearly century-old law that was intended to keep cattlemen from feeding bad medicine to their animals.

With the feds unwilling to do more consumer protection and private industry unable to, what happens now? The case heads back to the lower court, which could still rule in Creekstone’s favor under other arguments — for example, if it found that the USDA was arbitrary or capricious in stopping Creekstone. Truth is, the agency’s decision wasn’t really either of those. It’s simply wrong-headed and panders to the larger beef industry that doesn’t want Creekstone giving it competition that might push other producers into doing the same.

The testing might well be unnecessary, as the USDA argues. But it’s not going to hurt the meat, so what’s USDA’s beef with catering to people who worry about such things and are willing to pay the little extra for peace of mind?

It’s for your own good. It’s for your own good. It’s for your own good.

Even if the USDA is correct and the testing unnecessary how could anyone advocate the restriction? If Creekstone Farms goes under due to higher beef costs… so what?

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/…

Politicians who blame “speculators” in futures markets for the run up in oil prices — such as Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) writing in this morning’s USAToday — should consider a lesson from the lowly onion.

Onions are one of the few commodities in the United States for which there are no futures markets, according to an item published Friday in Fortune magazine. (Futures markets allow the sale of commodities for set prices at future dates.) It seems that in the late 1950s domestic onion producers blamed those same speculators in futures markets for driving onion prices DOWN. They successfully lobbied Congress to ban all futures trading in onions, a ban that is still in place a half century later.

So has the absence of futures-market speculation kept onion prices low and stable? Quite the contrary. According to Fortune:

And yet even with no traders to blame, the volatility in onion prices makes the swings in oil and corn look tame, reinforcing academics’ belief that futures trading diminishes extreme price swings. Since 2006, oil prices have risen 100%, and corn is up 300%. But onion prices soared 400% between October 2006 and April 2007, when weather reduced crops, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only to crash 96% by March 2008 on overproduction and then rebound 300% by this past April.

Sen. Dorgan and his allies will need to find someone else to blame for volitale and rising oil prices.

Isn’t this what serious economists, especially the Austrians, have been saying for perhaps 100+ years yet the politicians continue to use speculators as the scapegoat for many of the problems they instigated.

http://www.forbes.com/…

Here’s a fact that supporters of the Farm Bill might want to consider as the legislation is deliberated on the House floor this week: Between 1999 and 2005, the U.S Department of Agriculture paid $1.1 billion in farm payments to nearly 173,000 people who weren’t alive.

Nothing illegal–just Washington business as usual. Under certain conditions, estates can receive farm payments for up to two years after a recipient’s death. But according to a study released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office, 40% of the deceased who received payments from 1999 to 2005 had been dead for at least three years. In one instance, someone who died in 1995 got $400,000.

Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns says that “it’s an enticing headline to read [the report] and say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me–they’re paying money to dead people.’” But the reality, he says, is that the USDA makes its farm payments to farming operations, which are tied to land, and it has no control over who works that land.

If they got rid of these bogus subsidies altogether we’d save money and not have these ‘enticing headline’ possibilities. There are no reasons to be giving these millionaire farmers public money. As for the others who are unable to compete otherwise… too bad. Raise prices or get out of the business. The public shouldn’t have to be supporting their failed businesses.

http://www.cato.org/…

A major farm bill being debated in Congress gives policymakers a good opportunity to cut costly subsidy programs. Farm subsidies cost taxpayers up to $35 billion annually and tie farmers in a knot of unproductive regulations.

Most farm programs originated in the Great Depression of the 1930s, but they make little sense in today’s more prosperous and dynamic economy. Here are 10 reasons for Congress to reconsider the need for farm programs and to begin cutting them:

Government subsidies… get rid of ‘em. No more nanny state economic programs.
According to The CATO Institute: The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)

• Will spend $89 billion in 2007, or $774 for every U.S. household
• Operates 198 subsidy programs, listed here
• Employs 105,000 workers
• Administers 7,400 offices across the nation
• Oversees 1,791 pages of laws and 10,720 pages of regulations
• Imposes 84 million hours of paperwork burdens on Americans