The proposed SEC mandate on the ag sector is not a done deal yet, and there's an encouraging amount of pushback

 As if there weren't enough supply-chain hose-ups and factors increasing food prices already, the Securities and Exchange Commission is poised to impose new levels of cost and bureaucratic distraction on the nation's ag sector.

The SEC's pointy-heads seem to be oblivious to how this kind of thing has worked out elsewhere:

Echoing conflicts from Sri Lanka to Canada to the Netherlands, tensions between farmers and green-minded government policymakers are building in the United States, where producers are squaring off against a costly proposed federal mandate for greenhouse-gas reporting from corporate supply chains.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in March proposed requiring large corporations, including agribusinesses and food companies, to report greenhouse gas emissions down to the lowest rungs of their supply chains as a means of combatting climate change, which environmental campaigners contend imperils the planet and life on it.

This would be yet another instance of the big dogs at the top of the supply chain getting all up in the business of the small operations that continue to provide quality product at reasonable prices because they have time to focus on that instead of a bunch of resource-consuming record-keeping:

Reporting such indirect, “scope 3” emissions would require corporations to demand data on the use of fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, and other chemicals from small-scale farmers who say they lack the personnel and resources to comply. The challenge has been led by the powerful American Farm Bureau Federation and its state affiliates, whose representatives have met with SEC officials and organized their lobbyists in Washington.

“The farmers we represent are already heavily regulated at the state, local, and federal level but have never been subject to things concerned with Wall Street,” said Lauren Lurkins, director of environmental policy at the Illinois Farm Bureau. “Our farmers do not have a team of compliance officers or attorneys, and they don’t have a network of people to help them understand this. They really want to make sure they are growing crops and raising livestock and that [they] take care of the food supply.”

What's driving this is the ESG movement and the institutional investors who think it's the way to go:

The downstream data reporting is required, the SEC claims, to determine larger, publicly traded companies’ green score, called an ESG, or environmental, social, and governance rating. The greenhouse gas measurements would be made at least partly in accordance with a set of standards developed in 2011 by an international consortium of environmental groups and corporations.

While the SEC released its first climate-related disclosure guidance in 2010, the new requirements are driven by the “elevation of climate issues,” Erik Gerding, the SEC’s deputy director of legal and regulatory policy in its division of corporation finance, said in a May webinarput on by the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, an international group formed to increase reporting by companies of climate-related information.

The proposed rule is not driven by the average individual investor, but rather investment giants managing large portfolios.

“Several institutional investors who have collectively trillions of dollars and investments under management have demanded climate-related information … because of the investor assessment of how climate change poses a risk to their portfolio,” Gerding said.

Most shareholders in the U.S. prioritize traditional corporate performance over environmental and other social welfare concerns, according to a Gallup study released in February. The poll queried its Gallup Panel with $10,000 or more in equities or bonds.

In another survey, investment professionals in the National Investor Relations Institute ranked an ESG score fourth in risk to a company behind performance, crisis, and management troubles.

However, there is an encouraging amount of pushback:

Gary Gensler, the Biden-nominated chairman of the SEC and a long time progressive, said in announcing the plan that “it would provide investors with consistent, comparable, and decision-useful information for making their investment decisions.”

But the plan drew “an extraordinarily high” number of substantive comments to the agency – around 14,000 – during the 60-day requisite comment period, according to Ropes & Gray, a law firm that compiled a report on public comments submitted to the SEC on the climate disclosure proposal. Because of that, the comment period was extended an extra 30 days and closed on June 17.

Agribusiness represented 20% of the total comments received by the SEC, mostly opposing the rule. The SEC was scheduled to adopt the plan in October, but it is expected to finalize the rule later due to the volume of comments and pleas for reconsideration.

Among the comments was the promise of litigation from a group of 24 Republican state attorneys general, which cited this year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA that a federal agency does not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

“If the Commission insists on taking the same inappropriate course, we will be ready to act once again,” the letter stated. “We urge you to save everyone years of strife by abandoning the Proposed Rule.”

It's not just Republicans, though. At least one Democrat with his head on straight is concerned as well:

In a Senate hearing earlier this month, Gensler sought to assuage concern over the proposed rule voiced by Democrat Jon Tester, Montana’s senior senator and a lifelong rancher.

“If the public company says, ‘Hey, we need you … to tell us how much fuel you used, how much fertilizer you used, what your inputs were,’ and all that, it becomes an issue, especially for the little guy…” Tester said.

Gensler responded: “That’s not the intent of what we did … that’s the benefit of public comment.”

Just who are these institutional investors? Well, two of them, Ceres and Trillium Asset Management, have been around forty-plus years. They were both founded by Joan Bavaria, who was instrumental in getting this ball rolling as a "pioneer in socially responsible investing."

A network of activist companies like Ceres with large private equity and financiers on board are working to “transform” the economy over climate concerns, according to Ceres’ self-description.

In adherence, farmers will have to recreate their business model.

“Addressing these emissions will require a shift in agricultural production to more sustainable and regenerative methods…” Kate Monahan, director of shareholder advocacy at Trillium Asset Management, said in an interview this month with ESG Clarity, a website trafficking in ESG news directed at the financial sector. “It’s imperative that food companies keep improving measurement of their Scope 3 emissions’ sources to be able to prioritize actions that reduce their emissions hotspots.”

Let's hope that, even though the SEC's comment period for this proposal, which was extended for 30 days beyond the standard 60 due to the flood of response, is closed, opposition to this disastrous scheme continues to be loud and resolute.

It will increase the cost of food.

It will be tyrannical ("'transform' the economy").

It will deaden souls. 

 

 

 

 

Monday roundup

 Basecamp's CEO made a refreshing move corporate-policy-wise:

The web software firm Basecamp is asking employees not to discuss politics or partake in activism on company time. Founder and CEO Jason Fried also announced that the privately owned firm would be dropping committees, obsequious peer-performance reviews, and “wellness” and other “paternalistic benefits” that try to nudge employees toward a particular lifestyle.

Alas, apparently a sizable swath of the company's staff wanted the woke stuff:

Tech journalist Casey Newton said about one-third of the company’s roughly 60 employees took buyouts shortly after, with one fuming: “Basically the company has said, ‘well, your opinions don’t really matter — unless it’s directly related to business…’ A lot of people are gonna have a tough time living with that.”

Matt Welch at Reason on the interface between pandemic policies and the current fashionability of the concept of equity. 

A darkness is descending over Finland. Asserting sound Christian doctrine can get you charged with incitement, as Rev. Dr. Juhana Pohjola, Bishop Elect of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Dicoese of Finland found out when he said marriage was between a man and a woman, or have you facing six years in prison as member of Parliament, medical doctor and mother of five Paivi Rasanen is for similarly speaking out about the Christian position on human sexuality.

It's called human nature. It's called the natural reaction to the entity in society with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force coming for what belongs to you:

Wealthy Americans will avoid paying 90% of the estimated $1 trillion increase in investment taxes that President Joe Biden is proposing this week, according to new study from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School.

The Wharton researchers concluded that tax avoidance, much of it legal, would cut nearly $900 billion of what the proposed increase on capital gains taxes could raise for the government.

"We don't think that the proposal has a lot of teeth," said John Ricco, director of policy analysis at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a non-partisan fiscal policy research group at the business school. "There are a lot of games you can play to avoid paying this tax."

 The University of Pennsylvania plays identity-politics favoritism with its initiative to address how the COVID pandemic has affected its faculty's output in pursuit of tenure:

The  University . . . has issued guidance promising an extra pre-tenure year to pretty much all assistant and associate professors while observing that the pandemic’s “specific” effects “will be different for different faculty members.” UPenn could’ve stopped there, and just said that the pandemic disrupted a lot of teaching, convening, and research, and that’s why it’s giving faculty some leeway.

Instead, the university went on to endorse a series of rather specific race- and gender-based assertions about how the pandemic affected college faculty, backed only by the sloppy, misleading application of junk science. It’s a study in how a sensible impulse can go awry in the hands of today’s woke campus bureaucrats.

UPenn officials asserted that “the negative implications [of the pandemic] for traditional measures of faculty productivity may be greater, on average, for women faculty and faculty of color, given gender differences in caregiving responsibilities, disproportionate negative health- and economic-related effects of the pandemic on Black and Brown people and communities, and greater expectations for women faculty and faculty of color to engage in mentoring and institutional service. Early data show that journal submissions during the early months of the pandemic were lower for women than for men.”

We couldn’t help but be curious about the research cited to justify these sweeping assertions.

Turns out, the pickings are pretty slim. The guidance is supported by only six references. Two of the citations explain how to write a pandemic impact statement and outline general pandemic effects on faculty well-being. That leaves four to address the pandemic’s disparate impact on women faculty of color and women faculty more broadly.

The citation used to justify the assertion that the pandemic had a disproportionate negative impact on the research and publication of women and on black and Latino faculty turns out not to be a study at all — but a June 2020 opinion column, published by the National Academy of Sciences and penned by Jessica Malisch, a biology professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, which advises universities on how to promote gender equity.

Malisch’s piece is, itself, a revealing exercise. Malisch offers a handful of references to support her call for changing campus hiring and tenure. But only two of these are studies which purport to study the pandemic’s impact on faculty research (the others are op-eds or actions guides). And neither of the two studies actually support Malisch’s point. To back her claim that COVID-19 has driven “a wedge between women and men in academia in terms of research opportunities,” Malisch cites an Inside Higher Ed story discussing a study which used data from the first few weeks of the pandemic—and which found that women faculty, overall, submitted more work than they typically did in that time period! The other study, focused solely on women economists, found that women were submitting working-papers at their normal rate. In other words, neither study actually made Malisch’s point.

UPenn’s other citation regarding the pandemic’s effect on women faculty of color was an Inside Higher Education guide titled, “Keeping COVID-19 from sidelining equity.” The guide simply posited that higher education “will most likely become less diverse and inclusive, given the pressure the pandemic is placing on women and faculty of color.” In other words, it was a think piece predicting inequitable impacts which was then used as evidence of inequitable impacts. This would be considered shady practice by used car dealers — research institutions should be held to a higher standard.

The guidance also claimed that evidence showed “journal submissions during the early months of the pandemic were lower for women than for men,” though the data in question relied entirely upon a study of submissions to Elsevier academic journals in the first eight or ten weeks of the pandemic. The researchers found that women submitted about as many submissions as normal, while men submitted more than they normally would (hardly evidence of the pandemic’s devastating impact on scholarly productivity). However, given that the study only examined submissions between February and May 2020 relative to that same period in 2018 and 2019, and given that the pandemic didn’t actually cause disruptions until mid-March 2020, it’s hard to gauge how representative this limited snapshot might be.

Some Midwestern farmers are not going to take the Biden administration's racially discriminatory loan forgiveness program lying down:

A group of Midwestern farmers sued the federal government Thursday alleging they can't participate in a COVID-19 loan forgiveness program because they're White.

The group of plaintiffs includes farmers from Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota and Ohio. According to the lawsuit, the Biden administration's COVID-19 stimulus plan provides $4 billion to forgive loans for socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers who are Black, American Indian, Hispanic, Alaskan native, Asian American or Pacific Islander.

White farmers aren't eligible, amounting to a violation of the plaintiffs' constitutional rights, the lawsuit contends.

Jack Butler at National Review examines how consultant behemoth McKinsey is the prefect representation of the technocratic overlord class:

. . . one pithy expression of woke capitalism was a letter, signed by hundreds of corporations and executives and published in the New York Times in mid April, reflexively and baselessly condemning election-integrity legislation such as that passed by the Georgia legislature.

Among the signatories was McKinsey & Company, the consulting behemoth. Its employees are hired the world over, ostensibly to improve other organizations’ internal operations. But the true nature of the company, as well as its recent history, gives its presence on that list an irony dark enough to be worth singling out even among the many corporate hypocrites and virtue-signalers who signed that letter.

McKinsey is one of the premier firms in the consulting world, with annual revenue of $10 billion and 2,600 partners. Its business model is more or less that of a typical consulting firm: Its employees parachute in to an enterprise that has decided itself needful of improvement, study that enterprise’s operations and imbibe its goals, then advise it on how best to go about achieving those goals. With such a remit comes quite an ego; ergo, McKinsey employees, whether consciously or not, partake of the essence of a kind of technocratic capitalism that can be difficult to distinguish from its public-sector counterpart. “Its partners like to think of themselves as the smartest guys in the room,” as The Economist put it. The best and the brightest, you might say. And with that tendency comes an inclination to view one’s fellow humans in the abstract, as cogs in various machines — projection, perhaps, on the part of many consultants who are themselves cogs in a machine.

Some consultants, I assume, are good people. Or at least one would hope so, given that the people in leadership roles in society seem increasingly cast from this mold. McKinsey alumni in government include Pete Buttigieg, Susan Rice, and even Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse, a welcome traitor to his elite class. Maybe there is at times a need for their services. At other times, though, they can seem simultaneously arrogant and useless, showing up at a place they know nothing about, repeating back what they are told on-site, and then providing a pedigreed, credentialed gloss on marginal efficiency improvements or on the hiring (or firing) decisions a given organization’s executives hoped to make before they showed up. Think less Manhattan Project whiz kids and more the Bobs from Office Space.

John McWhorter, at his Substack newsletter It Bears Mentioning, has another must-read entitled "Do Black People Enjoy Being Told They Are Weak and Dumb? The Elect Hope So." A taste:

 Tom Taylor . . . [is] the head of the upper school at Riverdale Country Day school, and has penned an article where he serenely lays out his educational philosophy. You know the drill from the title alone: “Independent School Rhetoric and its Role in the Neoliberal Construction of Whiteness.” Some choice passages from Mr. Taylor’s opus:

In light of the deeply embedded and largely unexamined neoliberal ideologies in the foundation of NAIS [National Association of Independent Schools] (and thus in independent schools as a broadly constructed segment of the education landscape), it would appear that such schools are fundamentally problematic spaces.

Get ready, though: to people like this, problematic means blasphemous, and blasphemy requires desperate, and even hostile changes of procedure.

Neoliberalism and its attendant beliefs about the market, individual control, and meritocracy are existential elements of independent schools and, thus, any attempt at constructing an inclusive space or decolonizing community will face immediate challenges.

That is, the problems people like Taylor have with what they call neoliberalism justify deriding the idea of anyone having control over their fate (who isn’t white), and the things we consider it a positive trait to excel in – i.e. “meritocracy.”

Thus, private schools who find parents unwilling to accept moves toward culturally responsive schooling are free to draw a line in the sand, so to speak, and assert firmly and positively a philosophy of education that is explicitly anti-racist, decolonizing, and culturally affirming. 

That is, parents’ objections are not to be heeded because today’s “antiracism” is a higher morality these “Nice White People” are too benighted to understand (although quite a few of them are South Asian and African, but never mind).

In light of the problematic elements of neoliberal ideology evident in the structures of independent schools, it is not merely a freedom they have to construct their environment in this way, but in fact an obligation.

Again, the school is channeling Jesus and will not be questioned. Thou shalt not question Tom Taylor.

Given the buzzwords, the period of composition, and current practice at such schools nationwide, we are reasonable to assume that the program Taylor is espousing will include excusing black students from real standards, teaching students to distrust one another across racial boundaries, narrowing scholastic coverage to “center” issues of oppression and inequity, “decentering,” well, just plain school as “too white,” assigning KenDiAngelonian texts as scripture, and creating an atmosphere where students and teachers are afraid to take issue with any of this because they don’t want to be rhetorically roasted alive and socially excommunicated.

And Taylor’s position is “If parents don’t like what we’re doing they can go fuck themselves. We’re right and they’re wrong.”

Half of self-characterized Christians in the US say casual sex is acceptable.  

How the Republican Party treats Liz Cheney in the coming days will tell us whether it has a chance to once again be the natural home of conservatism or whether it is doomed as a moribund Trumpist freak show. 

 

 

 

 

 

The Very Stable Genius is an economic illiterate - today's edition

There's this tweet:

Has it occurred to him that the farmers wouldn't be in their current pickle if the free market hadn't been tampered with?

And "massive tariff money" is a ripe bit of hyperbole.

Is it massive enough to be fully funding this level of expenditure?

The Trump administration gave more taxpayer dollars to farmers harmed by the administration’s trade policies than the federal government spends each year building ships for the Navy or maintaining America’s nuclear arsenal, according to a new report. A National Foundation for American Policy analysis concluded the spending on farmers was also higher than the annual budgets of several government agencies. “The amount of money raises questions about the strategy of imposing tariffs and permitting the use of taxpayer money to shield policymakers from the consequences of their actions,” according to the analysis.

Larry Kudlow, can you not exert any persuasion over this guy? Or, God forbid, have you swallowed the Kool-Aid, too?

The Very Stable Genius has no idea what he's doing economically

The big fool tweeted this this morning:

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

Our great Farmers will recieve another major round of “cash,” compliments of China Tariffs, prior to Thanksgiving. The smaller farms and farmers will be big beneficiaries. In the meantime, and as you may have noticed, China is starting to buy big again. Japan deal DONE. Enjoy!

A few things:

One, tariffs are paid by US consumers.

Two, US farm delinquencies and bankruptcies are on the rise.  

Three, the Japan deal is not exactly done. Tariffs on Japanese automobiles are still being negotiated. 

The Protectionist-in-Chief is an unserious person.

Hey, everybody, here's a novel idea: how about we try the free market?

Two pieces came across my radar this morning that got me thinking about how far removed we are from a society in which sovereign individuals come to agreements with other sovereign individuals as to the value of particular goods and services.

The first has to do with a direct result of the Very Stable Genius's ignorance on the subject of free-market economics. He makes that clear with the pronouncement that farmers "can't be too upset, because I gave them $12 billion last year and $16 billion this year."

Um, no you didn't.

This is another display of his mindset, in which his role as the focal point of a cult of personality is conflated with that of his role as the chief of the executive branch - much like the business of lumping his private attorney, Rudy Giuliani, in with the Attorney General of the United States, Robert Barr, when dealing with Ukraine.

The VSG may have had the idea to use Market Facilitation Program funds already budgeted at the US Treasury, but it's not like he cut a check.

And what he's done is put farmers in a position of dependence on federal largesse.

And, as Taylor Millard demonstrates at Hot Air , Trump's ignorance is on display in a Health & Human Services scheme to create an "international price index" for pharmaceuticals - and is countered by Democrat Congressional proposal that is equally bereft of economic freedom - and common sense.

First this "index" idea:

“U.S. consumers and taxpayers generally pay more for brand drugs than do consumers and taxpayers in other OECD countries, which often have reimbursements set by their central government,” The administration wrote in their American Patients First plan while suggesting the burden of new drug development incentives needed to be spread equally between the U.S. and other nations. “In effect, other countries are not paying an appropriate share of the necessary research and development to bring innovative drugs to the market and are instead freeriding of U.S. consumers and taxpayers.”

Their ‘solution’ is to create an international price index looking at what other countries are charging for drugs and attempting to negotiate with pharmaceuticals on how to rein in the price.

HHS summarized the idea as Medicare setting drug prices based on whatever discounts American pharmaceutical companies give nations like France, Canada, or Germany. “With the model fully implemented, total payment for these drugs will drop by 30 percent,” HHS wrote last October noting there would be extra taxes involved in it. “The Target Price is 126 percent of the average price other countries pay for the drug. The model incorporates a new, larger add-on fee for hospitals and doctors that is independent of prices.”

Yay. New taxes. 

The obvious problem is the fact doctors and hospitals will simply raise prices to make up the difference in lost money. It’s the easiest way to pass prices along to consumers.

This is an excellent example of how Trumpist nationalism is definitely not conservatism. The idea of some kind of other countries being obligated to undertake an "appropriate share of the necessary research  . . . to bring . . . drugs to the market" runs counter to the understanding that private organizations are the entities that do the researching and developing - in a free market, anyway.

And everybody in the supply chain will adjust prices for their contributions as this "international index" affects them.

Now, the Dem approach:

Democrats, not to be outdone, have their own ideas on how to enact price controls. New Jersey Congressman Frank Pallone Jr. introduced the Lower Drug Costs Now Act of 2019 which puts Great Britain, France, Australia, Germany, Canada, and Japan on the price index list. Prices could be renegotiated each year:

In negotiating the maximum fair price of a selected drug, with respect to an initial price applicability year for the selected drug, and, as applicable, in renegotiating the maximum fair price for such drug, with respect to a subsequent year during the price applicability period for such drug, in the case that the manufacturer of the selected drug offers under the negotiation or renegotiation, as applicable, a price for such drug that is not more than the target price described in subparagraph (B) for such drug for the respective year, the Secretary shall agree under such negotiation or renegotiation, respectively, to such offered price as the maximum fair price.

There are plenty of problems with both proposals, especially with how they affect not only the public market but the private market.

“Both proposals give the government unprecedented price-setting authority in both the public and private markets,” FreedomWorks Regulatory Policy Manager Daniel Savickas to me in an email last week. “It threatens the ability for drug manufacturers to develop new drugs and market them in a timely manner, and we risk drug shortages beyond those already seen across the globe. These proposals are also tacit concessions that socialist economies have preferable drug pricing models, which (if that premise is accepted) puts our nation on the glide path to single-payer healthcare.”

The U.S. does have a drug price index as part of Medicare Part B. Americans for Tax Reform founder Grover Norquist noted in The Hill last December the U.S. bases its prices for certain drugs on the average sales cost for Americans. Why foreign countries need to be brought into the mix is anyone’s guess. 

And the rest of Millard's piece alludes to an important point in all this: crafting public policy based on subjective terms such as "high" and "fair" is a usurpation of the right of each sovereign individual to decides what constitutes either of those descriptions for himself or herself.

Cherish your humanity, fellow post-Americans. Let's not become the cattle-masses. Claim your freedom. Think deeply about your freedom. Talk to your kids about freedom.

Never mind what the government says about "fairness."

Farmers, Trump and China

America's farmers are feeling the pinch. 

U.S. farmers lost one of their biggest customers after China officially cancelled all purchases of U.S. agricultural products, a retaliatory move following President Donald Trump’s pledge to slap 10% tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese imports.

China’s exit piles on to a devastating year for farmers, who have struggled through record flooding and an extreme heat wave that destroyed crop yields, and trade war escalations that have lowered prices and profits this year.

“It’s really, really getting bad out here,” said Bob Kuylen, who’s farmed for 35 years in North Dakota.
“Trump is ruining our markets. No one is buying our product no more, and we have no markets no more.”
Agriculture exports to China dropped by more than half last year. In 2017, China imported $19.5 billion in agricultural goods, making it the second-largest buyer overall for American farmers. In 2018, that dropped to $9.2 billion as the trade war escalated, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

Kuylen, who farms roughly 1,500 acres of wheat and sunflowers, lost $70 per acre this year, despite growing good crops. Current government subsidies only cover about $15 per acre, he said.

“There’s no incentive to keep farming, except that I’ve invested everything I have in farming, and it’s hard to walk away,” he said.
“When four to five generations ahead of you have succeeded, and you come along and fail, you don’t see it as not your fault. You snap.”

Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, said China’s exit is a “body blow to thousands of farmers and ranchers who are already struggling to get by.” 

China has been the top buyer of US soybeans, and exports to China dropped 75 percent during the nine-month period from last September to last May.

And the bailouts that Trump has extended are not only economically self-defeating, they eat at a farmer's sense of self-worth:

Some farmers say the billions in bailouts and rounds of subsidies they’ve received thus far have failed to cover enough of their profit losses. Many say they’d rather make a profit in the marketplace than through a government program.
“I’m happy for the $16 billion, but I’d much rather get it from the marketplace,” Watne said. “The reality is I can’t. It’s going to be too little, too late for some farmers.”

It's true that China is a strategic rival of the US - a more formidable and ideologically foreign rival than we'd thought until recently - but playing games with the economic activity private citizens and organizations are engaged in is not an acceptable response.

The really pathetic spectacle is that of Trump's shills who lamely try to make protectionism - and some protectionism it's turning out to be - an aspect of conservatism.

Those same people would quite rightly be lambasting a Democrat president who was putting America's grain producers in this fix.

Meet the new farm bill, same as the old farm bill

We've been at this since 1933, when a one-time addressing of extremely unusual economic circumstances turned into the prototype for five-year cycles of revisiting major government interference in the free market.

A new goody included in this year's go-round is an absolutely nonsensical bit of raw redistribution - and not to some destitute grain grower:

[A new provision would] allow distant relatives such as cousins, nieces, and nephews to qualify for subsidies.

That subsidy is worth up to $125,000 a year, about twice 2017’s national median household income. It’s nice work if you can get it. And you don’t even have to bother with the actual work part. So long as you fill out the paperwork and claim some sort of management responsibility, which could mean as little as joining a conference call once a month, you can be eligible for subsidies, as can your spouse and all your family members.

And just as, on the individual scale, gummint largesse goes to folks far removed from the combine and the tractor, on the level of farms of various size, it's not the guy in bib overalls with calloused hands who's getting the preponderance of the gravy:

Farm bills are often touted as a way to nurture small businesses, protect “the little guy,” and save family farms, but the reality is quite different. A 2017 Congressional Research Service report found that “farms with market revenue equal to or greater than $250,000 accounted for 12 percent of farm households, but received 60 percent of federal farm program payments.” Other research by Vincent Smith at the American Enterprise Institute found that the smallest 80 percent of farms received just 10 percent of all subsidies.

Here's some other market distortions stirred into the mix:

This year's bill, like its predecessors, is a huge jumble of subsidies and other programs, such as quotas and price setting, that dole out welfare to corporate agricultural interests. It creates barriers for new farmers, wastes resources, and creates risk for farmers and taxpayers alike.

The bill leaves intact numerous harmful policies, including programs designed to shield the U.S. sugar industry from competition, which help keep U.S. sugar prices double those of the rest of the world. This hurts consumers and sugar-using businesses alike.

And when it comes to reining in cronyism and abuse, the final bill actually worsens the status quo. It would expand two expensive new programs from the 2014 farm bill: Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage. ARC covers farmers for revenue losses, while PLC covers them for low prices. Under the 2014 bill, farmers had to choose one or the other. But this bill would let them go back and forth each year to maximize their subsidies. 

I used to write for a now-defunct farm magazine and on occasion I'd get an assignment of a sort of wonky, policy-level nature. After a couple of times, I noticed something. Even agricultural economists at big universities just assume all these subsidies and programs are baked into the farming life in perpetuity. Even if they'd ever-so-glancingly acknowledge the market distortion involved, it was taken as a given.

And the particulars of the programs would make my eyes glaze over. Acronyms and formulas out the wazoo.

Freedom is always elegantly simple in comparison to any alternative. It involves risks and responsibility that you don't have to deal with when the government is not coming between buyer and seller. But whenever it's tried, it makes for win-win outcomes between buyer and seller.

 

Sunday roundup

Mexico's new president hits the ground running as the firebrand leftist he's shown himself to be throughout his career.

The Paris riots have metastasized beyond disgruntlement about fuel tax hikes. This is a wakeup call for the French people that they have something very fundamental about the present state of their nation's character that they need to squarely look at.

Jonah Goldberg's G-File for this week is a must-read. The whole thing is worth your while, both for the contour of the argument he builds, as well as the fact that it's one of the best examples of the particular style with which he composes these G-Files that he's offered in some time. I'l just tease with a couple of examples:

I’m on nobody’s side [regarding the Mueller investigation]. I don’t have a dog in this fight. To mix metaphors like a special blender for metaphors, I’m going to play the ball, not the man — or men. What I mean by that is that if the truth or facts or evidence is on Trump’s side, I’ll defend that. If it’s not on his side, I won’t be either.

That’s not going to be true for a lot of people who, for one reason or another, have invested way too much in Donald Trump and in the idea that he deserves their loyalty. That ain’t me.

I’ve spent the last couple years perhaps a bit too vexed by some of those people. I’ve finally figured out a way to make peace, in my own mind, with at least some of their behavior.

In print and in podcast, I’ve been talking a lot about how the two parties are shells of what they once were and how outside groups and institutions have filled the voids left behind by their shrinkage. The parties used to choose candidates and issues. Parties educated voters. Over the last 50 years, that function has essentially been outsourced to interest groups, media outlets, think tanks, etc. As a result, the dividers between different lanes shrunk or vanished. Writers and intellectuals on the left and the right became de facto political consultants and party activists. Many political consultants acted like public intellectuals or pundits. Intellectuals became entertainers and entertainers pretended to be intellectuals. Politicians quit their jobs to be TV talking heads, and TV talking heads run for office.

And

 There’s a reason why the Kavanaugh spectacle was the only time the broader American Right has unified during Trump’s presidency; it was because Donald Trump wasn’t the issue, even if he at times tried to make it about him. It was the one-time moment when all of the hats could converge or overlap each other.

There are those on the right who very much want the coming donnybrook to be like that again. It’s possible it will. It’s possible the Democrats will overreach or that Mueller will live down to the slanders grifters on the right have concocted about him. But I doubt it will happen. This will be about Trump. And while impeachment may not be warranted, he will not look good in this fight, because his true nature — and the nature of the creatures he surrounds himself with — will once again be exposed.

I’m not going to the mattresses in any of this, because I see no reason to give the president — or many of his most rabid opponents — the benefit of the doubt, never mind loyalty. The only major player here who deserves the benefit of the doubt right now is Robert Mueller. Because while we may learn that he made mistakes or overstepped, as of now, the one thing I know he cares about is the facts. About his slander-spewing right-wing critics — and to some extent his left-wing sanctifiers — I know no such thing.

Carl Cannon's Real Clear Politics piece entitled "Intersectionality and Today's Twitter Trotskyites" is likewise best read in its entirety, but this is a representative of its essence:

Unfamiliar with the terms “misgendering” or “deadnaming”? Don’t feel bad; they’re of recent vintage. Misgendering means referring to a man who’s transitioning (or who has transitioned) to a woman as a male – and vice versa. Deadnaming is even more Orwellian. It means you can’t refer to a famous U.S. Army traitor by the name under which he was court-martialed. Or mention the full name of the television star who captured Americans’ hearts by winning a 1976 Olympic gold medal in the decathlon.

Yes, the logic of intersectionality is a mystery. A Jewish woman is banned from Twitter for saying that gays have little freedom under Sharia law. But a notorious Jew-baiting black nationalist gets a pass for a “joke” comparing Jews to termites.

Looks like biofuel mandates live to see another day, thanks to a Republican Congress afraid to say no to King Corn and an economically illiterate president.

Grabbing subsidization as an attempted quick fix for protectionism

First, take in the full pettiness, boorishness and economic ignorance of this tweet from the Very Stable Genius:

Tariffs are the greatest! Either a country which has treated the United States unfairly on Trade negotiates a fair deal, or it gets hit with Tariffs. It’s as simple as that - and everybody’s talking! Remember, we are the “piggy bank” that’s being robbed. All will be Great!

Now, consider what the pointy-heads feel it's necessary to do with your tax dollars in order to deal with the fallout from this kind of "thinking":

The White House is expected to announce a plan to provide $12 billion in government aid to farmers harmed by the administration’s multi-front trade war, the Washington Post first reported Tuesday morning.

Under the plan, which could be announced as soon as Tuesday, farmers whose products have been hit with retaliatory tariffs as a result of President Trump’s tariffs on other countries will be provided access to three distinct forms of aid: direct assistance, a food-purchase program and a trade-promotion program.

The announcement is expected to come as President Trump continues to escalate his protectionist rhetoric on U.S. trade with China.

The administration has already implemented tariffs on $34 billion in Chinese exports and Beijing has retaliated in kind, down to the dollar. In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly threatened to implement tariffs on the entirety of China’s more than $5 billion export market, placing Beijing at a distinct disadvantage, given that it only has roughly $120 billion in U.S. exports available to hit with tariffs.

Soybean farmers have been hit particularly hard by the trade war as prices have plummeted. The president has repeatedly vowed to help soften the blow as Midwestern farmers, a key part of his base, have increasingly turned against his protectionism.

The aid proposal, which relies in part on a depression-era Department of Agriculture program designed to bail out farmers, is the product of a three-month research effort intended to help the administration see its trade war through by warding off domestic opposition in the farming community.

The depression-era program, known as the Commodity Credit Corporation, is empowered to borrow $30 billion from the Treasury Department absent Congressional approval.

So, the hand of Leviathan is brought in to shore up the pricing hose-up that was caused by our current boneheaded trade policy.

Here's a novel idea:

How about if we just let theses farmers sell their products at whatever their true market value is? 

Again I ask, what do Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore have to say about this in their private discussions?

This gets us pretty far afield from free-market behavior.

In a very real sense, this country is being held hostage to the VSG's personality quirks. In two vital realms - security and trade - it leads to a day-by-day crapshoot.

UPDATE: Just came across this press release from Farmers for Free Trade:

Farmers for Free Trade, the bipartisan coalition working to oppose trade policies that hurt American farmers today released the following statement from Executive Director Brian Kuehl. 

"Farmers across America depend on open markets and stable contracts for their livelihood.  The best relief for the president’s trade war would be ending the trade war. Farmers need contracts, not compensation, so they can create stability and plan for the future. This proposed action would only be a short-term attempt at masking the long-term damage caused by tariffs.." 

“Farmers can and do weather many storms, but this economic cyclone of tariffs is creating long-term, irreversible damage to the heartland. The $20 billion trade surplus in agriculture is due to decades of effort by American farmers who’ve opened new markets and developed world class supply chains.  Unfortunately, a one-time check won’t replace the deterioration of long-term contracts and relationships. Nor will it address the many sectors of agriculture impacted – from producers, to grain bin operators, to shippers. Farmers need stable markets to plan for the future.  As such, we urge the Administration to take immediate action to stop the trade war and get back to opening new markets." 

Amen.