April 27, 2022
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
It's time for conservatives to move beyond the frontal assault on ag subsidies
By Rick Manning
It has been almost ninety years since the federal government created agricultural subsidies to stop the ravaging of our national food production capacity due to severe drought in the Plains states.
The federal government reaction to the “Dust Bowl” was to create a support system designed to ensure that farmers were not wiped out by the wild year to year swings in production which drove farmers out of business when the crops were too good and prices fell below the cost of production and when crops failed because of weather or other factors.
And ever since, conservatives have sought to end this farm welfare to no avail.
The answer for the failure is obvious when one looks at the political map. The states of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota and North Dakota are each huge farm states. All fourteen US Senators from these states are Republican. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that between 1995 and 2020 these states combined received $108.5 billion in commodity subsidies or crop insurance payments.
Raise your hand if you think you can end farm subsidies with a solid fourteen Republican Senator bloc against you. These quixotic frontal assaults by conservatives against agriculture subsidies have failed time and again because a core GOP constituency opposes them.
This is why Americans for Limited Government has embraced a third way that enjoys bi-partisan support to begin the process of ending or substantially curbing these subsidies. In the modern world, governments subsidize agriculture production with the goal of dumping excess production into foreign markets, driving prices down and domestic competing farmers out of business, which makes it a trade matter between nations to be reciprocally negotiated.
The two largest sugar producers, Brazil and India each heavily subsidize sugar production and dump the excess produced to drive down the world sugar price and eliminate sugar industries around the world. To show just how dominant Brazil and India are the two countries combine to produce about 17 percent more sugar than the total produced by the next eight largest sugar producing nations in the world. Just as Saudi Arabia is the market maker in the world of oil, Brazil and India are the market makers in sugar.
And they exploit this subsidy driven dominance by controlling the world sugar price through the massive supply they dump onto the world market. Their goal is to increase their market share in countries like the United States and in doing so, driving the currently robust U.S. sugar industry into the history books. And if not for the supports in the current system, they would have in a large way have succeeded, putting American consumers at the whim of an international market that is notoriously volatile.
So what can be done to create a semblance of free markets for the sugar industry with the goal of using it as a model for the rest of agriculture?
U.S. Representatives Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) and Dale Kildee (D-Mich.) have introduced bi-partisan legislation which serves as a good starting point. Known as Zero for Zero, the Cammack-Kildee proposal urges the President to pursue trade policies which would result in the “elimination of all direct and indirect subsidies benefiting the production or export of sugar” by countries who subsidize sugar production at a proscribed level.
The resolution goes on to urge the president to present sugar policy reform legislation once the ending of these major subsidies is certified.
While some may worry that this approach is too tepid, and would take years to accomplish, the truth is that the seventy-to-eighty-year frontal assault on ending agriculture subsidies have failed time and again. Zero for Zero puts a focus on the President’s ability to jawbone other nations into limiting or ending their sugar supports, allowing the United States to end or dramatically limit ours.
No approach is perfect, but the Cammack-Kildee bill provides a credible pathway to creating agriculture trade agreements which keep the American farmer on a level international playing field while ending the pernicious effects of government subsidized agriculture.
When faced with a level international market, no one can out-produce the American farmer, with the reciprocal Zero for Zero approach, the entire agricultural subsidization can be overhauled and hopefully eliminated. Without it, it is likely we will face another seventy years of grinding our teeth in disgust at a corporate welfare system as conservatives flail in futility at the agricultural subsidy windmills that always defeat us.
Rick Manning is the president of Americans for Limited Government.
To view online: https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2022/04/26/its_time_for_conservatives_to_move_beyond_the_frontal_assault_on_ag_subsidies_828960.html
Video: Utah blasts woke ESG state bond ratings by S&P
To view online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PO_q0FeEb2E
ALG urges no vote on FTC nominee Alvaro Bedoya
April 26, 2022, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement urging a no vote on Federal Trade Commission nominee Alvaro Bedoya:
"Americans for Limited Government urges a no vote on Federal Trade Commission nominee Alvaro Bedoya. While the FTC is an obscure agency to many, it is actually one of the most powerful in the U.S. government with the capacity to destroy corporations with antitrust actions. With the hard left devastated by Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter, now the pressure on the Biden administration to salvage Twitter's censorship algorithms through any means available. The FTC has the power to investigate and disrupt virtually any transaction like Musk's under the guise of antitrust. The partisan balance of power at the FTC (and also the SEC) is at stake, and no senator should trust the Biden administration not to use the full weight of the federal government to restore the left's censorship regime. Bedoya was discharged from committee without any evaluation of how he would deal with this particular issue. If nothing else, his nomination should be sent back to committee for further evaluation. Absent that, there is no excuse for voting to confirm Alvaro Bedoya to the FTC."
To view online: https://getliberty.org/2022/04/alg-urges-no-vote-on-ftc-nominee-alvaro-bedoya/
ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured oped from Western Journal, former Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich takes on the left’s assault on objective truth:
Bob Ehrlich: Left's all-out assault on objective truth creating some frightening situations
By Bob Ehrlich
Some call it political correctness on steroids. Others call it wokeness. President Joe Biden might call it “the thing.” Many on the right and center (e.g. Elon Musk) call it countercultural, intellectually dishonest, dangerous.
You might have a different set of adjectives in mind. But I suspect all share a similar theme: Our culture — and especially our children — suffer when objective truth is rejected.
The predicate for this new worldview is clear: Truth must be interpreted as subjective. You may even have heard wokesters (including the sitting vice president of the United States) say as much in advising young people to “speak their truth” — seemingly without regard to whether that truth has any relation to reality.
Of course, once that threshold is crossed, everything is possible.
Accordingly, otherwise serious adults argue that babies are born either oppressed or oppressors, people with no scientific qualifications definitively state that the earth will be toast (so to speak) in precisely nine (!) years without the Green New Deal, and that it is perfectly fair for boys to compete against girls in athletic contests. In other words, two plus two no longer equals four. Math is racist, dontcha know.
OK, you may say. Surely this iteration of sociological revisionism is temporary, a harrowing but brief journey down the endless road to a progressive utopia. But you would be wrong.
Subjective truth, identity politics, revisionist history, gender fluidity and an emerging “green” religion have all rented space within a deadly serious movement that has taken up residence in one of America’s two great political parties. And both are propelled forward by a new fondness for censorship that not so long ago would have been intolerable, especially on the left. (More on this below.)
A sense of no-judgment valuelessness emerges from all the subjectivity. “Who are you to judge?” is a common theme here. But there is another and equally dangerous consequence of all the hand-wringing: a naivete that refuses to accept objective evidence of the evil and evil actors that make the real world such a dangerous place.
It is here where Secretary of State Antony Blinken so willingly indulges his Chinese counterparts in indicting a “racist” America, where John Kerry asks Russian President Vladimir Putin to consider his war’s impact on climate change, where Blinken shares U.S. intel with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the hope that the despotic strongman would lobby his friend — Mr. Putin — to forego his long-planned invasion of Ukraine and, in perhaps the most spectacularly naive move ever, requests that Mr. Putin act as a broker in the renegotiation of the terribly flawed Iran nuclear agreement with the terror-sponsoring mullahs in Tehran.
Does the left deny objective truth?
It is as if the flower power, anti-war generation of 1960s activists have all come back to lead the world and transform America.
On second thought, this analogy will not suffice. Those ’60s refuseniks would never have countenanced speech codes or trigger warnings or anti-free speech safe zones. They practiced, indeed, celebrated speech and dissent, especially on campus. For them, Berkeley was the celebrated center point of the era’s various civil rights causes — but it now appears it represents the beginning of the end of a movement once all about unfettered speech.
My strong suspicion is that real ’60s-era liberals are none too pleased with their successor generation’s illiberal constructs. Yet with precious few exceptions, these aging activists are strangely silent.
Hopefully, they will remember (per the wisdom of the 17th-century duke La Rochefoucauld) that hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue before it is too late.
To view online: https://www.westernjournal.com/ehrlich-lefts-assault-objective-truth-creating-frightening-situations/