Farmers and Subsidies

Our populist-skewed views of American farmers is that they are always self-sufficient, always above the need for help. More skeptical views are that they are guilty of hypocrisy, complaining loudly about government assistance programs while taking farm subsidies themselves. Megan McArdle weighs in on the subject:

The core of the farmer aversion to welfare programs specifically is that old farmer maxim: “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.” But there’s a flip side to that: farmers never starve. They have lots and lots of other problems, and my grandparents’ generation was very poor. But with land, they eat and keep roofs over their heads.

So there’s a certain emotional resistance to the notion that it is necessary to provide food and shelter for able-bodied adults. And also a deep emotional resistance to going on assistance. They’re much more sympathetic to disability, social security, and other transfers to the less able-bodied.

There’s also the fact that one of the things that can make it very hard for a farmer to keep a roof over his head–aside from the debt he is prone to acquire during his more exuberant harvest seasons–is property taxes. They make near-subsistence farming nearly impossible.

So is this assessment fair? Farmers can raise a stink about welfare that doesn’t augment hard work but rather replaces it. On the other hand, urban poverty has certain extra danger in that subsistence living is impossible with no work and no land. This may be a case of apples to oranges. Or it might be a better example of why we need something like the WPA, which put young men from families on the dole to work. Most Americans are pretty okay with government support when it represents at least some amount of work. We just have a real aversion to something for nothing.