Farm Aid and a Great Depression

Sallie James of Cato writes about more legislation proposed by Congress that will keep America's farm subsidies going. This is a slap in the face to the multilateral Doha Round. If we are going to use unilateral measures, we should at least do so by increasing free trade (ie. FTAs) and not by increasing government hand-outs in the name of "leveling the playing field."

Her last paragraph sums up the absurdity of this legislation...

The proposed legislation will keep the current farm bill in place for "at
least" one crop year after the congressional approval of any Doha outcome. Given
that the "emergency" aid given to farmers as part of the New Deal in the 1930s
is still with us, largely intact, more than 70 years later, there is little
reason to hope that the opportunity to reform U.S. agricultural policy will be
seized any more forcefully a year after negotiations are over than now, when
there is so much to be gained from stepping up to the plate.

John Kenneth Galbraith

"Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower." - John Kenneth Galbraith writing in The New Yorker in 1984.

The GI has two great entries on this man who recently passed away. It is interesting to note that two of the most famous economists to the American public are Milton Freidman and John Kenneth Galbraith. Two polar opposites. Galbraith was a man in love with the state and its control. And Friedman is a man in love with the power of freedom and the ingenuity of the populous.

It should be noted that economic debate is no more in fashion in this country. Now we have Lou Dobbs, Nancy Pelosi, and others from the left and the right who rail against basic economics. We need a debate between the real two sides of economics, Keynesian vs. Classic Liberal. Any takers?

Why leftists think the way they do?

It has been only a year since my conversion to enlightenment. During my college days I thought socialism was good and America was bad. But why did I feel this way. I always said that the only reason I have the stuff I did was due to the fact that I was LUCKY to be born in America. I felt bad that not everybody could be so lucky. However, you could be born anywhere and succeed as long as you are given the freedoms that we enjoy in America. I also felt bad for the sins of the Western World's past. I felt the only way to rid myself of this guilt and to be righteous was to be Anti-American. Shelby Steele recently wrote in the Journal about this white guilt.

Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly disparate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today's international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort -- only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.