The Department of Food Subsidies

Victor David Hanson in The National Review reports:

The Department of Agriculture no longer serves as a lifeline for millions of struggling homestead farmers. Instead, it is a vast, self-perpetuating post-modern bureaucracy with an amorphous budget of some $130 billion — a sum far greater than the nation’s net farm income this year. In fact, the more the Agriculture Department has pontificated about family farmers, the more they have vanished — constituting now only about 1 percent of the American population.

Net farm income is expected in 2011 to reach its highest levels in more than three decades, as a rapidly growing and food-short world increasingly looks to the United States to provide it with everything from soybeans and wheat to beef and fruit. Somebody should explain that good news to the Department of Agriculture: This year, it will give a record $20 billion in various crop “supports” to the nation’s wealthiest farmers — with the richest 10 percent receiving over 70 percent of all the redistributive payouts. If farmers on their own are making handsome profits, why, with a $1.6 trillion annual federal deficit, is the Department of Agriculture borrowing unprecedented amounts to subsidize them?

At least $5 billion will be in direct cash payouts. Yet no one in the USDA can explain why cotton and soybeans are subsidized, but not lettuce or carrots. In fact, 70 percent of all subsidies go to corn, wheat, cotton, rice, and soybean farmers. Most other farmers receive no federal cash. Yet somehow peach, melon, and almond growers seem to be doing fine without government checks in the mail.

Theft through majority voting, also known as rent-seeking.