Theft at the Public Till
that they simply can't have what they think they are entitled to get. Some of these farm programs are the ones that provide lavish incentives to grow a given crop and, when naturally too much of the crop is grown, provide lavish incentives not to grow the crop. This money-for-no-crop-or-work concept is part of the conservation program to keep some lands idle, a plan that has put 61 million acres-the size of Indiana and Ohio combined-to "sleep" under federal cash protection. Meanwhile, foreign food exporting nations have increased their acreage more than that. The biggest mistake is to give money to products instead of to people. Instead of giving the money to the redundant corn grower, the government pays money for extra corn by keeping the price at a certain level no matter how much is grown. The effect is just as we have seen for two generations: corn prices remain higher than they should be, and we have silos of use- less, rotting corn. Let us count the ways this is stupid. First, prices stay high. Second, the extra corn growers will never even try to change jobs. Third, further efficiency becomes less urgent, stifling the next generation of changes-as with bovine growth hormone. Fourth, trade wars start be- cause, to keep prices high, cheaper corn from other countries is banned, as in France. Fifth, we pile up stocks of permanently worthless stuff instead of encouraging the creation of wealth people actually want to buy. Our nation's milk price support system is crazier than any thing dreamed up in seventy years of Soviet communism. Everyone knows and admits it, and it still persists. We subsidize tobacco even while spending millions teaching people not to smoke. (At the same time, we throw marijuana sellers into prison for thirty years, although their drug is certainly less addictive and probably less harmful than the tobacco our government subsidizes.) The system is crazy, but we keep doing it Why? Two reasons: First, people getting these permanent subsidies think they might starve if the subsidies stop, because they have no assurance the government would send checks to people as reliably as it sends checks to bushels of corn. Second, even when the government does in fact try to send checks directly to the farmers instead of to the corn, the farmers themselves scream the loudest. France has tried to give permanent subsidies to the noisy
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