Michael Lissack French farmers to simply maintain their farms as farms, but the farmers reject this form of compensation. The French government realizes the farm subsidies keep prices high, and, worse, threaten world trade agreements and the development of the European Community, but can't talk the farmers into accepting checks to remain farmers. And why won't they accept these checks? For exactly the same reason many old-thinking taxpayers don't want to send them checks: they feel it is wrong to pay or be paid for doing nothing. Our Protestant work ethic says it is better to pay for work that is useless and even harmful than it is to give money to people just because they are people. The farmers themselves accept this old-style Puritanism/Calvinism (call it whatever you want, you know what I'm talking about) as much as anyone else does. It would destroy their self-esteem to accept checks just for waking up and walking the fields every day, or even for working hard at improving the countryside they own. Their self-esteem requires they grow corn and receive a fair price for it, as their families for generations have done. They don't know whose corn goes into the surplus silo, after all, so they can presume theirs is actually being eaten. Consumers don't notice negative events like the failure of prices to go down, so they don't scream. And the effect of a trade war, or reduced inter- national trade, seems too remote from the corn price subsidy for people to tie them together in the public debate. It might seem to be another paradox, but the facts are indisputable: it is better to pay people to do nothing than it is to pay them to make unneeded corn by keeping the prices too high. Most Americans undoubtedly share a belief that businesses should be encouraged to do the things that sustain the nation's economy and its peo- ple: to hire American workers, invest in American plants and equipment, create products that the United States can export to bring money into the country. Instead, businesses today are rewarded as they eliminate jobs, sub- stitute minimum-wage or lower-paid workers for those who once earned middle-income wages, employ part-time rather than full-time workers, trim or eliminate health care benefits, slice into pensions and other benefits, and move their manufacturing plants offshore.
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