Contributor John Klar on 2-Sep lamented that the agricultural sector is “in decline” if measured by manpower. As is the manufacturing sector, though in both cases, output is up. America is producing more with less — that is what we do — and, all other things being the same, that is the only way that real pay rises.
Compare India, which maintains a caste of farmers, each working their own one acre of land and, if they’re lucky, having an arrangement to rent someone else’s tractor at key times of the year or have large enough families to rely on manual labor.
“Larger farms on ever-pricier land” implies that ag consolidation is pushing up the price of farmland. Of course, the real culprits are the depreciation of the dollar (which means some pricier things aren’t pricier at all, notably gasoline, still way under 2 silver dimes per gallon) and galloping land-use regulation.
Yes, the manufacturers of industrial farm equipment, including unmanned tractors, make extravagant claims that are sometimes false. But in a voluntary economy, they eventually have to deliver. And every farm still has a human owner who, under capitalism, has an incentive to preserve the value of the land rather than let machinery prevent it from growing future crops.
Mr. Klar’s fundamental complaint is social, that we are drifting away from a “community” that esteems its farmers, “to a time when a man is no longer valued for his labor.” Baloney. Surely there was a craft behind the skilled making of buggy whips, and the watchmaker with his eyepiece was especially prized, but break open a watch or a computer now and gaze at the etches that no human could have drawn. Here too, we are better off.
And will be, provided we resist various people’s laments that strangers don’t seem to share my values, and resist responding with coercion. Surely Mr. Klar does not support the drafting of youngsters to be farmhands — no matter how many lessons in simple living they would learn. But what he does advocate for are “regulatory, tax, and fiscal benefits” (subsidies!) to support the small farm — that is, that we do for the farm what we have already done for the electric vehicle: Coercively make prices wrong, to induce people to make decisions that don’t benefit them, as though they shared our values.
It is nonsense that “dependency on foreign…foods…threatens… international competitiveness.” Access to foreign goods, especially where foreigners can produce more cheaply than Americans (repeal wage-and-hour laws, including the remaining Obama-care mandate!) is how we remain competitive — combining the best values the world can provide into American products. Government impeding commerce is how we ruin this process — even before farmers start spending their time flocking to Concord and DC to beg for favors rather than cultivating their land and studying the market for their products.
And yes, farmland speculator Bill Gates does not care about either farming or our values; he is sneaking around to impose his own values on us. But the billions he made enriching our lives with software that made us more productive, belongs to him, and not only if he spends it in ways that please us.
We will be best off under liberty. Eliminate government obstacles to land ownership. Eliminate obstacles to modernization and consolidation, leaving it to the farmer to decide what suits him. Eliminate “Marketing Orders” and other federal policies that tell the farmer what and how much to grow, so he can spend his time studying the market and deciding how to please the customer. Eliminate the Department of Agriculture, ignoring arguments, including this one, that we first must prove we “care” about the farmer.
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Now, nearby, Ian Underwood suggests that we adopt a collective goal for government schools of achieving 95% literacy. He’s absolutely right that clearly stated goals, like JFK’s moon-shot goal, are essential to focus large groups of people. What he omits is that America stopped worrying about a huge waste of money only when JFK was shot to death.
Mr. Underwood describes the government schools as “one of the largest enterprises in New Hampshire” that lacks a single mission statement. But the schools are in fact a gunpoint monopoly (you have alternatives but only if you pay for both, even with Education Savings Accounts), staffed by employees with tenure and a national, Marxist labor union resistant to innovation and willing to cripple students to support a political narrative about a chest cold that didn’t threaten them.
Yes, sure, let’s mandate that the schools teach, and honestly measure how well they do it. The only problem is that we are not the majority at School Town Meeting — and if we briefly find we are, the Moderator recesses the meeting while those who receive, benefit from, or massage the loot get on their phones and bring out reinforcements.
We are faced with competing mandates that schools drive COVID infections to zero, encourage cross-dressing and recruit kids for sodomy, teach a corrosive view of American history when they aren’t advocating that we ignore it altogether, harass and assault prom-goers if they seem to come from conservative families, and throw athletes off sports teams for privately questioning orthodoxy.
Yes, the state constitution says education is “essential to the preservation of a free government”. So are shoes, which enable us to walk to the polls; neither means the government ought to be the sole or dominant provider; nor that, failing this, education or shoes would not exist at all. Part 2, Article 83 of our constitution of 1783, which Mr. Underwood quotes, is full of such platitudes, which have been corrupted by a mischievous judiciary; above all, the one for future legislators “to cherish the interest of…schools” — to have specific values, no matter what their voters prefer — which supposedly dictates equal funding in every town.
But what if we had a Republican legislature? Alas, no. Instead, we now have Donor and Recipient towns which, if they do anything other than goose campaign contributions, direct the money of strangers toward districts that our best measurements show are failing. Rather than cut through centralized mandates, we have simply added healthier mandates. Cursive writing and multiplication tables?
This is the bureaucratic and legal environment we are dealing with, and Mr. Underwood has not shown how his appeal for the schools to do a simple job well will prevail against all the other “stakeholders,” including some who don’t want the job done at all. What we need to do is undercut the bureaucracy, starting by striking at least the first half of 2:83. After 4 years, repair the 2019 vandalism to the SB-2 procedure, so the decision to take power away from Town Meeting no longer needs the approval of Town Meeting. Let us underfund the government schools until dozens of attractive and competitive alternatives emerge. Those that achieve 95% literacy will thrive — if that is what the customers want.
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Whether farming or schooling, we don’t especially need a clear call for gunpoint agencies to “act like a business” and deliver against specific values that we are to embrace as a collective. We would do better to rediscover the benefits of individual liberty.
