The Farm Bill & ‘Libertarian Populism’
Can the GOP be pro-worker and anti-government? A
bill that showers subsidies on agribusiness is the opposite.
By W. James Antle III
July 15, 2013
One step forward, two steps back. The Republican
Party is like an alcoholic in recovery, with
periods of sobriety punctuated by long,
destructive benders as it once again falls off the wagon.
In June, a critical mass of House conservatives
helped vote down a nearly $1 trillion farm bill
that merged all the protectionism and cronyism
that dominates modern agriculture policy with the
worst excesses of the food stamp program.
Republican leaders were reportedly very unhappy,
but the sweetheart deals for the sugar industry
and federal crop insurance program are two
corporate welfare programs that are totally
counterproductive for the taxpayer. Moreover,
while it may make political sense to link food
stamps and farm subsidies, the economic justification is less obvious.
Defeating the bloated farm bill gave Republicans
an opportunity to separate these spending items
so they could then trim and reform them both.
Without nutrition programs for the poor making up
80 percent of the price tag, welfare for Archer
Daniels Midland would receive more scrutiny.
So naturally, Republicans followed a moment of
clarity by taking a nasty spill off the wagon again.
Last week, the House passed a farm bill
containing all the agribusiness largesse of the
one it voted down in June. In fact, the crop
insurance program and the sugar subsidies were
made permanent. But there was no money for food
stamps, combining a fiscal disaster with a political one.
Republicans voted for this monstrosity by a
margin of 216 to 12. To be sure, some felt
pressure from the leadership to vote for the bill
since Eric Cantor and company had magnanimously
heeded their request to separate out the food
stamp spending. And absent some congressional
action, the country would have reverted back to
the price controls and central planning of the
Truman-era Agriculture Act of 1949.
But the takeaway is that the Republicans once
again favor welfare for the rich and politically
connected while opposing it for the poor and
others unrepresented by K Street lobbyists.
Needless to say, it’s unclear that naked
redistribution to benefit GOP clients is
preferable to such redistribution on behalf of Democratic constituencies.
It’s one of the reasons Newt Gingrich’s 2012
critique of a “food stamp president” rang so
hollow. Gingrich tried to make an obvious point
that a measure of economic success is how many
people are receiving paychecks rather than food
stamps. But Republicans too often lack
credibility on this point, making it easy for
Democrats to suggest his complaints were just racist code words.
When David Stockman was Ronald Reagan’s budget
director, he urged Republicans to attack weak
claims and not just weak claimants. When Gingrich
first became speaker of the House, his young
Republican majority boasted an ambitious agenda
of cuts to corporate welfare. Yet in practice the
party still too often defaults to what New York
Times columnist Ross Douthat paraphrases as
“small government for thee, but not for me.”
Indeed, the Gingrichites’ reforms of Aid to
Families with Dependent Children endured longer
than its more circuitous attack on farm
subsidies. And for all the sound and fury about
the Obama administration “gutting” welfare
reform, the GOP’s attempt to rein in the
agriculture subsidies was largely undone by subsequent Republican Congresses.
And yet an alternative does exist. Some call it
libertarian or free-market populism: smash the
alliance of K Street, Wall Street, and
Pennsylvania Avenue. End the incestuous
relationship between big government and big
business. Close the revolving door and tear down
the political privileges that accrue to the wealthy and powerful.
This is a populism that can largely be pursued
within the confines of constitutionally limited
government, as it involves ending bailouts and
turning off the spigot of federal subsidies that
flow to private companies. Instead let a genuine
free market with greater equality of opportunity bloom.
Sometimes it will require new laws to unravel
decades of state-managed corporatism. This would
likely include breaking up the big banks,
implementing tax reform, and imposing
transparency regulations on the people who would
serve in government and the large companies seeking its benefits.
Simply arguing in these terms would lead to some
level of openness. Obamacare is sold as an attack
on the big insurance companies, when in fact
insurers, pharmaceuticals, and the hospitals were
all intimately involved in its design and
promotion. (It’s not surprising that the employer
mandate is on hold while the individual mandate
is proceeding right on schedule.)
General Electric, General Motors, andas even the
hapless Mitt Romney recognizedSolyndra are the new welfare queens.
Libertarian populists have their blind spots.
They are still too fixated on tax rates that
remain far from the Laffer Curve’s prohibitive
range while neglecting the payroll taxes many
working-class taxpayers watch consume their paychecks.
While more tolerant than some of the
conservatives who came before them, they are also
more naïve about the consequences of mass
immigration and family breakdown for limited
government. While rightly concerned about
rent-seeking, libertarian populists may
exaggerate the number of voters who care about the Export-Import Bank.
But the idea largely remains untried, save for a
few symbolic measures pushed by congressional
backbenchers. Paul Krugman may absurdly flail
away at libertarian populists without addressing
any of their actual arguments. Yet free-market
populism is as absent from the GOP agenda as it is from the Times op-ed page.
The GOP stands to gain from the discovery that
small is beautiful. If only it can break its
destructive addiction to all things big.
W. James Antle III is editor of the Daily Caller
News Foundation and author of Devouring Freedom:
Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-farm-bill-libertarian-populism/
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