It’s all part of The Matrix.

Why, some might wonder, do these so solicitous-conservatives never suggest that money might be put into effective anti-malarial vaccines or treatments? Ans: because they don’t stand to make any money from it, themselves.

These guys who are DDT apologists are also Olin fellows. That is to say, they bear the same relation to the truth that John Lott/Mary Rosh (also an Olin-sponsored “scholar”) has to facts about guns. What has Olin to do with DDT? Why, the same as Halliburton to do with “frivolous asbestos lawsuits.” Olin also makes gunpowder, btw.

Just follow the money.

Anyone care to parse this? I don’t have the heart.

Clearly, idolatry of the ‘free trade’ is wide-spread, but I’m not aware of any powerful protectionist preconception occupying the public mind at this time.

…by not subsidizing and protecting the damn producers.

It sure is. But that’s not challenging any annoying dogma, any stupid common wisdom – so what’s the point?

Sure, like I said I might be wrong and I was just trying to present/understand the side of the argument that I don’t even support.

“What they do is guarantee an income for farmers, usually based on the land they own”

So is it just a cash handout? That’s definetly a much better way of subsidizing somone than monkeying around with prices indirectly.

It’s perfectly sensible for any community (including nation-states) to support and protect their local consumers.

…by not subsidizing and protecting the damn producers.

You ask, If subsidies in general (not just farm subsidies) don’t hurt countries other than the one putting the subsidies in place, why do other countries fight so strongly against them? Is it just that their governments are captured so much by domestic business? (#32)

This phenomenon is well known in economics. The people harmed are more aware of the harm than those benefited are aware of the benefits. It is not just domestic business interests, but domestic interests in general. In other words, being able to buy European grain for $.10 a pound, rather than native grain at $.15 a pound, is good for everyone who buys grain; however, it is very bad for the native farmers who now can’t make a living farming.

In more geekish terms, free trade benefits the economy on balance, but it has distributional effects. Since utility curves are risk-averse and logarithmic (having X more helps less than having X less hurts, and having 10X as much is not 10X better), the perceived utility effects often run in different directions than the actual economic effects.

This would have been a reasonable description of the Common Agricultural Policy up until about 1999. However, it’s no longer accurate at all.

1) EU subsidies for most food industries are no longer volume-based or carried out through market purchases. What they do is guarantee an income for farmers, usually based on the land they own.

2) Under the “Everything But Arms” regime, the poorest countries of Africa are allowed to export anything (except arms) into the EU on the same terms as member states. Unsurprisingly, this has not resulted in Africa exporting massive amounts of wheat and dairy products into the EU, but this is because most of the EU is, for the most part, composed of much better land for dairy and arable farming than most of Africa. The real beneficiaries of the EBA regime have been the value-added vegetable industries (environmentalists occasionally sniff at whether it really makes a lot of sense to grow haricots verts in Zinbabwe for air-freight to Stockholm but this is a separate question).

I would actually be prepared to pay money to clean the Internet of all the CAP-related articles dated before 1999 which still clog up the debate on this subject.

Starvation usually isn’t caused by an absolute lack of food, but by lack of money to buy food in a subset of the population, often agricultural labourers not hired when crop failure means there is no harvesting work to be done.

Diversification between export and food crops is probably safer than food crops alone.

soru