Robert Blumen links to this piece by Michael Pollan from the New York Times. It is a remarkable article in many ways. It praises the New Deal for raising the price of ag products and cutting back dramatically on supply—in an economic depression. He then blasts current farm policy for subsidizing too much production. His core complaint: Too much food at absurdly afforable prices! In the sweep of history, a nice problem to have! But whatever happen to leftist bellyaching about “Hunger in America“? It seems to have shifted to fretting about “Obesity in America.” (The “Center on Hunger“ says that the hunger-obesity paradox is explained by overarching problem of “the overall energy density of diet”; the tortured explanation is that hungry people maximize calorie intake when possible so they won’t suffer from hunger later.) Finally, Pollan dismisses “classical economics” because it presumably doesn’t apply to agriculture: farmers keep planting even when prices fall. He might have taken a closer look at what the current Ag Sec calls the US’s “market-oriented safety net.”
