The rambling political post; or How your coke dealer helps pay for your corn syrup but hurts our manufacturing business

I’ve spent more time talking about politics on this blog than I thought I would when I started it in October*.  For my efforts, it’s been called a “crazy leftist blog,” among other things. So I feel I need to clarify my political beliefs.

*I don’t know what the fuck I was planning on writing about when I started the blog. Hell, I still don’t know what I plan on writing about. I kinda just like talking. With a blog, you don’t even need someone to listen to you.

As I’m sure my limited but intelligent readership* has figured out, I tend to lean pretty far to the left. But not always. However, I have come to hate the current incarnation of the Republican Party. This is mostly because it is no longer the party of limited government, strict interpretation of the Constitution, and fiscal conservatives. It is more and more the party of the Religious Right. I do not want any part of that.

*That’s limited in size, not limited in intelligence.

I do differ from the Democrat party-line on a few key issues. My biggest quibble is the way Democrats view free trade. Obama has announced that he wants to rework NAFTA. (At least he knows what NAFTA is.) America’s use of farming subsidies is baffling, to say the least.

I had a finance professor who liked to tell a joke about our farming subsidy policy. He’d say, “Did you hear NASA found a way to grow corn on the moon? It’s true. The only problem is now we have to pay someone not to grow it.” The point is that we artificially bump our crop prices up. This leads to the inevitable overgrowth of crops. The farmers don’t care because the government will pay them anyway. So we have all this leftover corn and soybean and milk and chicken and we can either throw it out or dump it on developing nations.

This is how you destroy a developing economy. The developing world relies more on agriculture than we do. We dumped so much powdered milk on Jamaica that it’s cheaper for people to buy our imported milk than their fresh milk. We dump our dark-meat chicken on whomever will take it (and that’s how McDonald’s and your local supermarket can offer “all white-meat chicken”). Our farmers will overwork their land and deplete its soil in a shortsighted attempt to make more money now. Meanwhile, the Nicaraguan government can’t buy its farmers the basic tools to start farming, because that would count as “subsidies” and they would lose their IMF money – IMF money-takers are expected to be entirely free-market. So the Nicaraguan farmer, unable to afford the tools to grow grains, resorts to growing cocaine. It’s an easy cash crop. Did I mention that the US is the leading funder of the IMF? How is this hypocrisy allowed?

There are other repercussions. Boeing, the American airplane company, is getting beaten by Airbus, its European counterpart. The EU helps it out by subsidizing airplanes, something that is technically illegal through our trade agreements. However, if America would ever want to fight for Boeing’s right to compete, the EU would counter that we cheat by subsidizing our farmers. This is how farm subsidies indirectly hurt our manufacturing industry.

I don’t know where I’m going with all of this. It started as an example of how I’m supposed to be independent-minded and not a party-line Democrat, but I went on a tangent and ended up on coked-up farmers stabbing GM with their pitchforks.