It occurred to Pharaoh, however, that a mind that had all the answers ought not to languish in Potiphar’s jail. So, on the very spot — confirmation by the Senate was quite unnecessary in those days — he appointed the surprised Joseph to be his secretary of agriculture. There being no Constitution to swear by, and no Bible to kiss, Pharaoh made the appointment stick by putting his own signet ring on Joseph’s hand and a solid gold chain around his neck. For lack of an automobile, an official chariot was assigned to the new dignitary. No doubt, though the chronicle does not record it, Joseph must have had a big office to work from, with a lot of assistants and secretaries, for mention is made of many overseers. FULL ARTICLE by Frank Chodorov
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/10757/joseph-secretary-of-agriculture/
Joseph, Secretary of Agriculture
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We all tend to blame the Democrats for all our problems: the tax and spend people. But no one mentions that between Reagan, Bush and Bush the R’s have increased the public debt by at least 10 trillion. Maybe, just maybe that’s where our problems have started from. In Econ 101 I learned that its either Guns or Butter, but the R’s seem to just borrow and spend.
Lets for once add the R’s in for some blame.
A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with one of my neighbors who is a dairy farmer about the Dairy Product Price Support Program.
For many years, the Department of Agriculture’s price supports were based on distance from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The farther a farmer was from Eau Claire, the higher the price support. This led to the development of dairies in highly inefficient locations such as Florida and California, rather than in efficient locations like Wisconsin.
Price supports are still in place. According to the National Milk Producers Federation, the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) currently has a standing offer to buy butter, cheddar cheese, and nonfat dry milk, (per USDA’s specifications) at the minimum product prices set by law. These prices are: Butter $1.0500, Nonfat dry milk $0.8000, 40-lb block cheddar cheese $1.1300, 500-lb barrel cheddar cheese $1.1000.
The following should have been in quotations, “the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) currently has a standing offer to buy butter, cheddar cheese, and nonfat dry milk, (per USDA’s specifications) at the minimum product prices set by law.”
Speaking of ancient fallacies … and if you’ll excuse me for getting off the topic … I just read the most ghastly article at Bloomberg. If you think that there has been any intellectual progress since the Great Depression and that there is any hope of avoiding a repeat, then please read this (and weep). Fed Reserve, Goldman Sachs, JPM, Pimco, Nobel-prize-winning economists, oh my! We’re in trouble now.
STIGLITZ: DEFLATION THREAT PUSHES FED TO KEEP RATES AT ZERO
… A sustained price drop might set off a chain reaction in which lower profits force employers to pare wages and payrolls. That would erode consumer demand, exacerbating wage cuts and firings … Such a spiral led to Japan’s “lost decade†of slow economic growth in the 1990s. A more vicious version in the U.S. helped create the Great Depression six decades earlier …
“Deflation is definitely a threat right now,†Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz [said] …
… Regional Federal Reserve Bank Presidents Janet Yellen, of San Francisco, James Bullard, of St. Louis, Richard Fisher, of Dallas, and Charles Evans, of Chicago, have expressed concern in past weeks about the possibility of declining prices …
… Economists at New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the second- and fifth- biggest U.S. banks by assets, say there’s so much deflationary excess labor and plant capacity in the economy that the Fed won’t raise interest rates until at least 2011 …
… “The potential for a deflationary downdraft continues for several years†if economic growth doesn’t accelerate, [said] Bill Gross, who runs the world’s biggest bond fund …
The Fed needs to “keep inflation expectations from slipping to undesirably low levels in order to prevent unwanted disinflation,†Vice Chairman Donald Kohn, 66, said …
The slowing in core prices is more of a concern, said Michael Feroli, an economist at JPMorgan …
The deflation danger is compounded by household debt, said Paul Ashworth, senior U.S. economist at the consulting firm Capital Economics in Toronto. U.S. homeowners owed $13.9 trillion in the third quarter of 2008 … “Deflation combined with high indebtedness can be very problematic.â€
… Profits have evaporated as companies lose pricing power …
Who was Frank Chodorov? — a great LR.com link.
My father was a still worker who used to deliver speeches at the door of the factory calling his fellows to order: strike, strike, strike. In the other days the patrons negotiated hikes in the salaries. The next year the same movies happened again. And so on… My father died. Others took the realm from his hands. The world turns the same forever…
This article really bothers me because it seems that the bible/torah is advocating statism. Though it doesn’t affect my personal beliefs, it could make it harder to sell libertarianism to Jews or Christians.
Thanks for the link Ohhh Henry.
About the only thing that the fed could do more wrong at this point is to start offering negative interest on money. It’s enough to make one wonder if the little white lab mice are really experimenting on us and not the other way around.
This story has circulated in the past few years but it is still a good lesson for those who have not seen it yet.
Catching Wild Pigs
A chemistry professor in a large college had some exchange students in the class. One day while the class was in the lab the Professor noticed one young man (exchange student) who kept rubbing his back, and stretching as if his back hurt. The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country’s government and install a new communist government.
In the midst of his story he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked, ‘Do you know how to catch wild pigs?’ The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line. The young man said this was no joke. ‘You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in The last side. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat, you slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd. Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity.
The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening to America. The government keeps pushing us toward socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, tobacco subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare, medicine, drugs, etc.. While we continually lose our freedoms — just a little at a time.
My father is in the dairy business. He has a small to mid-sized farm and nearly every other farm around us has become enormous – with many of the farms having thousands of cows each.
He’s been very concerned lately because the price has been quite below the cost of production and he’s reluctantly been taking the subsidy payments. Meanwhile, the large farms have all received milllion-dollar plus grants for anaerobic digesters, which allow the factory-sized farms to create their own electricity virtually free of charge, saving them tens (hundreds) of thousands of dollars a year and providing income for the excess electricity, which could be significant.
I’m concerned that their costs of production for the large scale farms will fall further due to these digesters, which could really hurt small farms as their costs will likely stay the same or increase.
On top of that, these large farms receive the milk payment subsidies themselves. Many of them are apparently pushing for a quota system that restricts the supply of milk produced in an attempt to drive prices back up. My dad is latched on to this idea, as well.
I’ve been trying to open my dad up to the libertarian/Austrian arguments and I think he agrees but all he has now is general frustration.
Does anyone have any other good articles, general thoughts, suggestions on the situation, etc. that I could point in his direction or bring up? He thinks the digesters are great but aside from the fact that they’re enormous taxpayer-funded projects, I would assume that they will only hurt smaller farms like his because they would never have that opportunity themselves to get such a grant (not that they should).
Thanks!
The taxes nowadays are in the form of money, instead of grains. This money is returned to the people in the form of roads, schools and other things, instead of bread: but is it “at a price” ?
If a road, for example, cost 10 000 000 $ to a government in taxes already collected, this government doesn’t ask another 10 000 000 $ in taxes to deliver it to the taxpayers.
So it seems to me that the example of Chodorov doesn’t apply to our days, unless I missed something.
One of the key messages here is that the “Granary†perverts the market. Grass fed beef, fruits and vegetables are at a disadvantage due to subsidies for corn, wheat and sugar. These subsidies are paid for by money that’s printed out of thin air and are contributing to the devaluation of our dollar. As our health declines as these cheap sugary carb-laden foods are presented to us in the supermarkets as healthy alternatives via public health dogma, we are blind to the hidden costs of metabolic syndrome. When our purchasing power decreases as our dollar is inflated, the cornfed among us will cry out for even more subsidies for these monocultural crops to ensure that their grocery baskets stay full!!! It’s a vicious cycle. It’s bringing down our health, our dollar, and our freedom, as we become more dependent on the Granary.
All of what Chodorov writes about in the above is relevant today, but it goes a step further. Before we get to the point of mass shortages, mass hunger, and hyper-inflation, we get to experience the joys of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, etc., from metabolic syndrome as ag subsidies continue to cause malinvestment of what we grow and eat.
john,
Pretty much every libertarian HAS been criticizing the R’s.
I don’t know where you’re getting that they haven’t.
There is no reason to think that the agrarian economy of ancient egypt suffered from business cycles. In fact, the cycle is only explained in the presence of fractional reserve banking and is amplified by fiat currency. None of that existed some 3500 years ago.
It was due to Joseph’s insight that he was able to preserve the excess grain in storage during the 7 years of plenty. It very well may be that the technology did not exist to store grain for so many years, hence Joseph’s contribution to the economy, and a true investment.
And even though, what is seen is the tax on the grain, what is not seen is that no other tax, such as gold, is mentioned.
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