Farm Subsidies and the WTO, OR: Our Government: Robin Hood On LSD

So if you're a news junkie, you've probably been hearing a bunch of talk about how the WTO (stands for World Trade Organization) talks fell through. If you're not, then you haven't. I hadn't, but it sounded interesting.

So I did some digging as to what exactly the dealy-o was. Essentially, the US tanked its relations with the EU, China, India, and the entire WTO because it wanted to keep its farm subsidies at current levels. At the same time, India and China refused to remove their own protectionist policies, i.e. little devices called SSMs, which basically allow those countries to make US businesses pay more money to sell stuff to India and China. These are meant to protect poor Indian and Chinese farmers, just like US farm subsidies are meant to protect poor US farmers.

India and China won't get rid of their SSMs until we get rid of farm subsidies.

So what we have here is three major countries endangering trade and the global economy to maintain protectionist trade policies.

That annoys me.

The countries involved are being driven by this illogical fear that if they remove their trade barriers they will be flooded with cheap goods that will put all their poor farmers out of business. "But the farmers!" they cry. "They'll go out of business! They'll run out of food and lose all their business and live on the street and wear banana peels on their feet and eat stray rodents for nourishment! We need to protect them from those lousy foreigners!"

That also annoys me.

Reasons why:

Let's talk about farm subsidies. Farm subsidies work like this: The government gives money out of it's federal treasury to farmers, who then use the money to produce cheaper, better goods. No harm in that, right? It sounds like an innocuous policy to help the US compete with those nasty foreign growers. Not so. Farm subsidies, while sounding good are (like so many other feel-good government handout policies, cough-cough) impossible and immoral in practice. Warning: Statistic ahead:

-In 2003 (the most recent year I could find data for) the top 10 percent of subsidy recipients received 68 percent of farm subsidies, and the top 5 percent received 55 percent.

Imagine you have a hundred dollars that you want to give to a good cause--to help someone needy.

You have twenty friends. One is insanely wealthy, one is moderately wealthy, eight are doing OK, and the remaining ten are dirt poor. Who do you give you're money to? Well, DUH! You give 55 bucks to your millionaire friend, 13 bucks to your moderately wealthy friend, and divide remaining 32 bucks among the remaining 18 friends. Overall, even if you fairly distributed the remaining money, each of your non-wealthy friends get a buck seventy. Seriously? You fail.

It's like some sort of mutant welfare for rich people. It's bad enough that the US government has decided that it's its job to take on the fair distribution of wealth--That's another blog post for another day--but the gov seems to have decided that the rich staying rich is a more valuable goal than the poor becoming less poor. It's reverse Socialism. It's an economic oligarchy. Robin Hood is on LSD. Instead of taking from the rich and giving to the poor, take from everyone and give to the rich.

And now (to get back to the WTO) we're sacrificing our social and economic ties with the EU, the WTO, India, China, Brazil, etc. so we can continue to give our money to rich people.

Why?

Well, isn't it obvious?

The poor can't pay for advertisements.

The poor can't hire lobbyists.

The poor can't get you reelected.

Rich people can.

Cato and Reason understand.

www.reason.com/news/show/36207.html

www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8459