Obama hates family farms

[BigBallinStalin]

This is great! By making labor more expensive for the smaller farms, more of them will be unable to compete. Then the larger businesses in the agricultural sector can buy them up! Anyone who opposes this is in support of child labor! EVIL!! EVILL!!! Isn't it so amusing how our morality has been flipped?

Crony capitalism is like this fantastic magic show, where bureaucrats make sure that the workers are protected, and that the children are saved from the evil capitalists. Never mind that some businesses (small farms) will go under, unemployment will slightly increase, real income for these families will significantly decrease, etc.

But the large agribusinesses earn a bigger margin than family farms due to economies of scale, so this shift will cause an overall increase in GDP, which is good for everyone, since it is an increase in average income.

Yay economics!

GDP is only an "objective" measurement, thus can't be used for interpersonal comparisons of utility, which is perceived subjectively. Therefore, it doesn't follow that overall increases in GDP are "good for everyone" because an increase in GDP doesn't reflect a net positive increase in everyone's values. Valuation is subjective, and changes in the valuations of millions of individuals aren't reflected in GDP measurements.

All GDP says is "the price of all final goods produced and consumed for this year within this political boundary are $_____." Increases in GDP don't mean "everyone benefits." Ceteris paribus, the government could spend $1 trillion on military and state police, thus causing an increase in GDP. Has everyone benefited? Is this good for everyone? We can't know from GDP, nor can we know what would have happened had the government not spent this money, or (had the government not cracked down on the employment of young people--in regard to the OP).


Why is GDP misleading at times? (lagniappe!)
(sorry couldn't help myself, I was on a roll, so I kept typing)

show

Yay Austrian Economics!

Sometimes I have trouble telling whether I've successfully trolled you, or if I've just given you the set-up you were hoping for. Either way, I'm usually satisfied with the reply.

Customer satisfaction is my priority, Timminz.

[BigBallinStalin]

Why don't they remove the subsidies given to the large agribusinesses and decrease the import tariffs and quotas on foreign sugar and corn?

This would save the taxpayers >$60 billion (IIRC), the consumers of foreign sugar, corn, etc., would realize an increase in their real income (due to the lower prices), and would have more income to dedicate to other goods--foreign and domestic. This also helps other countries and their people, which undermines some of the need of top-down planning by the IMF and World Bank.

But the subsidies are tied to US farmers not selling their product for cheap. The US has enough arable land, cheap labor from Mexico and advanced farming technology that it could flood the world food market if didn't have an incentive to avoid producing at capacity. The resulting plummet in food prices would destroy domestic agriculture in many other countries. What will you tell a Frenchman who now has to eat baguettes baked from U.S. wheat?

The underlined conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. In short, the future is uncertain. Why?

If the subsidies are removed, then less efficient land for the production of food would be much less profitable and may even incur losses. If new ways of generating profit on that land seem too daunting, then that land would be sold, and the buyers would tend to use that land for more valuable purposes--as they see fit. So, who knows what the new structure of production will look like, and who knows how this will affect future prices within the food markets and in non-food markets.

Immigration laws? Currently, they might not be lax enough to lead to your scenario.

What really constraints their production at the moment is that their incentivized to charge higher prices because the tariffs and import quotas make them very impervious to cheaper competition. If anything, the developing countries and their lower priced goods would "wreak havoc" (to use your rhetoric) on the global market, but it depends on the future demand for these goods.

We can't predict the future with exact measurement because there are way too many variables, some of which can't even be quantitatively measured, which undermines my credence in "economic impact" reports. Those reports are kind of like Econometric magic shows.


Here's one example.
If the protectionism against foreign sugar is dropped, then IIRC the domestic price of sugar would be 4-8 times less than current prices in the US. Buyers of corn syrup in the US would shift to foreign sugar if the price would be lower (which I imagine it would). This would result in decreased outlays for producing whatever goods which previously used corn syrup.

So, the entire structure of production which shifted from buying corn syrup would experience lower prices in their production process. Any consumer who valued the lower price and sugar over the likely to be higher price corn syrup would buy the products with foreign sugar. This increased demand for sugar-infused products would drive the price up, increase profit margins, thus enticing more producers to increase output.

The consumers realize an increase in their real income, thus enabling them to spend more on other goods. How will this affect these domestic and foreign markets? No one can know from the present. No one knows which markets will tend toward equilibrium (i.e. where supply and demand intersect) and what the equilibrium/market-clearing price might be.




Current production levels are limited by the consumers' demand. Each good categorized as food is still homogenous in the sense EDIT: YARGA YARGAR YARAG, saxitoxin has a nice hat; therefore, your argument is invalid.

[Timminz]

If the protectionism against foreign sugar is dropped, then IIRC the domestic price of sugar would be 4-8 times less than current prices in the US. Buyers of corn syrup in the US would shift to foreign sugar if the price would be lower (which I imagine it would).

This is a great example! Not only would sugar be cheaper, but a reduction in subsidies to corn growers would also cause the price of corn syrup to rise.

Also, sweetened foods and drinks would be better (in my opinion). Cane sugar tastes much better than HFCS.

[Symmetry]

ITT, does Obama hate family farms?

Pro-Obama posters: No
Neutral posters: No
Anti-Obama posters: No

/thread

[PLAYER57832]

When Congress creates a law, they often create an organization to enforce the law; that organization is under the auspices of the executive branch. That organization is permitted to create regulations, but the regulations are subject to comment from the general public (and by general public I mean interested parties and lobbyists).

Regulations are required to be consistent with the laws. So, you have two limitations on regulations: (1) they must be consistent with the law and not exceed the law and (2) commentary from the general public.

Furthermore, the purpose of regulations and the purpose of departments operating under the auspices of the executive branch is to enforce the law. That's what those entities are doing.

Do regulatory bodies have too much power? Yes.
Are regulatory bodies not accountable? Yes.
Do people not know what regulatory bodies are doing? Yes.
Are they expensive? Yes.
Should they be cut? Yes.

Are they unconstitutional? No.

Except this is the problem. Whether you think the regulatory agencies have too much power depends on what you think needs to happen, to be done. I find it supremely hypocritical that so much of this is done in the name of "promoting security" and "economic prosperity", but ignores the very long term impacts that happen when the environment is destroyed and harmed. A lot of todays objections are focused on simply denying that proven impacts are real, never mind hamstringing groups attempting to assess impacts resulting from new industries.

I know you are pretty aware of the issues with deep hydrofracking, so I will use it as an example. The same groups supporting individual freedoms, etc are the very ones who have supported legislation here in PA put forward by Corbett and passed just recently that strips local governments of the right to control drilling even within their own cities and town boundaries. We have to accept the very minimal state rules or lose potentially huge allotments of money at a time when government services and education are being seriously cut already. Its economic blackmail. Further, research into the impacts is being cut off or simply just not funded.

You can find similar type stories for just about any proposed cut in regulations and regulatory agencies. Too often the real complaint is that the entity is doing its job.. and a few people don't like that the job is being done. Politicians know this, and that is why the fight is not focused on specifics, but instead on general complaints of "no more taxes", "reduce government", etc.

Sadly, there is no real opposition in this. Both Democrats and Republicans do it. The few voices that actually challenged this type of thinking are quickly being sidelined. They are not outright squelched, but finding the information takes work and is getting harder and harder. It is not permeating the general discourse like it did in decades past.

[Phatscotty]

Over the past few years, agencies under the Obama administration have been commencing full scale raids on individual farmers, as well as on family farms, under the auspices of non-legislative regulation created by the ATF, EPA, and FDA. These raids focussed on several agricultural areas that included the sale of raw milk, grazing on federal lands, water collection and usage, and the raising of certain categories of swine.

On April 23rd however, the stakes got much higher for the individual farmer as the FDA is now using the terrorist based "Bank Secrecy Act" as justification to invade, investigate, and even confiscate the bank accounts of Americans in the agricultural business.

Now, Obama has the Dept. of Justice going after small farmers under the post-911 “Bank Secrecy Act” which makes it a crime to deposit less than $10,000 when you earned more than that.

“The level we deposited was what it was and it was about the same every week,” Randy Sowers told Frederick News. The Sowers own and run South Mountain Creamery in Middletown, Maryland.

Admittedly, when the Sowers earned over $10,000 in February, and learned they’d have to fill out paperwork at the bank for such large deposits, they simply rolled the deposits over to keep them below the none-of-your ****-business amount, rather than waste time on bureaucratic red tape aimed at flagging terrorism or other illegal activities.

“Structuring,” explains Overlawyered.com, “is the federal criminal offense of splitting up bank deposits so as to keep them under a threshold such as $10,000 above which banks have to report transactions to the government.”

While being questioned, the Sowers were finally presented with a seizure order and advised that the feds had already emptied their bank account of $70,000. The Dept. of Justice has since sued to keep $63,000 of the Sowers’ money, though they committed no crime other than maintaining their privacy.

Without funds, they will be unable to make purchases for the spring planting.

When a similar action was taken against Taylor’s Produce Stand last year, the feds seized $90,000, dropped the charges, and kept $45,000 of Taylor’s money.

http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-a ... k-accounts
www.foodfreedomgroup.com