Local Food and a Carbon Tax

I just thought--logically the "local food" people should support a carbon tax. If transporting food the estimated 1,000 to 1,500 miles to the place of consumption is wasteful (i.e., adversely impacts the environment), then a carbon tax would encourage producing food locally.

Closing With the Enemy, Coordinating with Your Friends

This is an interesting book I read over the last couple weeks. It's a study of the lessons the American Army learned as they fought across France into Germany.

The author takes a very different approach to the US and Germany military than does James Q. Wilson, whose book "Bureaucracy" is good. Wilson sees the Germans as emphasizing small group cohesion, flexibility, etc. while the U.S. was more bureaucratic, top down. This book almost reverses it--seeing the U.S. as being willing to learn from the bottom up and not top down.

Be that as it may, foremost among the lessons learned were a set of lessons on coordination, whether between tactical air and infantry, tanks and infantry, engineers and infantry (in river crossing and assaulting fortification), etc. Because my own bureaucratic career was plagued by problems of coordinating different branches of the agency, and different organizations within USDA, this experience from a completely different world is interesting.

Part of the lesson is simplifying communication. If tanks and infantry use different radios (reminiscent of the different radios used by NYC police and fire), stick a handset on the back of the tank and have an infantryman ride there. Use light planes and forward air controllers to coordinate tactical air and infantry. (The idea of a dedicated liaison, like the FAC, is something I would like to try in my next reincarnation as a USDA bureaucrat.) Another part is proper allocation of resources--attacking in a way that maximizes the artillery available to the combat commander, for example.

Bottom line: bureaucracy is bureaucracy, because people are people, whether they wear camouflage or white collars.

The Economics of Farming, Revisited

Extension people discuss wheat prices here.

The "target price" for wheat has been $4 since the 1981 farm bill (I think--too lazy to check). That's a quarter of a century. Cash wheat prices are about 50 percent above that price, probably a historic level. It's another reminder of the effect of having a free market system, with many sellers and few buyers, and inelastic demand and supply curves. You can have gluts, you can have scarcity, you can have periods when wheat farmers mint money, or not.

The ups and downs used to be more drastic, with more severe impact on the national economy. Now wheat is just another commodity, of relatively little economic significance to the overall picture.

But: "give us our daily bread".

Some Unneeded Publicity--Payment Limits

Ronald Reagan once used a "welfare queen" (someone who had exploited the system to live high on the hog) to attack welfare. The same seems to be happening with payment limitations. See this link on Maurice Wilder, the reigning king of farm program payments:

"Yes, our pal Maurice certainly gets around. While he isn’t busy farming farm programs for oodles of cash, he’s pumping oodles of Nebraska’s precious groundwater. Or, to be precise, somebody else is pumping it for him:

A man who owns 125 Nebraska irrigation wells has never drilled a single one. Maurice Wilder, 66, of Clearwater, Fla., primarily develops retirement communities, recreational vehicle parks and office buildings in Florida and Texas. And he's never lived here.

As noted above, The King of Farm Programs doesn’t confine himself to farming, either. Check out the following data on our little buddy:

• Total holdings nationwide estimated at $500 million in 2005.
• Owns 10 office buildings in the Tampa Bay, Fla., area with more than 1 million square feet of space.
• Has 4,500 mobile home lots and 12,500 recreational vehicle lots in Florida and Texas.
• Commercial and residential land holdings.
• Owns 200,000 acres of farmland and ranch land in eight states. That's roughly 312 square miles, or nearly the size of Douglas County."

Wingnuts, Drivers' Licenses, and Bureaucracy

The WorldNetDaily is a voice of the wingnuts, but they had an interesting story last week on the drivers licenses in North Carolina. Of course, it's slanted in aid of people opposing immigration and the alleged North American Union. (Ironically, for the right wing patriots, they bitterly oppose a dream of all of the Founding Fathers--one nation for North America.)

The problem starts--when an Ontario snowbird drives to Florida, how does the state cop recognize a valid Ontario drivers' license? If you have 75 political jurisdictions issuing licenses, it's hard for the police to know which ones are facially legit, and which are fake. So the motor vehicle administrators, who have their own organization, got together on a hologram of North America to put on the back of the license. North Carolina is the first to start using it. That sets off the wingnuts who are fearful of loss of sovereignty.

Stereotypes Blasted Away

In the last few days the Post's Angus Phillips, the semi-retired outdoors writer, has written about the diminished state of hunting in America. Now comes Mr. Beauregard to write about the start of the French hunting season, with their 1.4 million hunters.

Now, if I had asked this question: France has how many hunters (America has 4.1 percent)?

a .1 percent

b .5 percent

c .1 percent

d 1.5 percent

e 2.0 percent

how many people would really have said answer "e".

Localvores

A flurry of books and articles on eating locally. Barbara Kinsolving's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"(book and website); Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker, this CNN piece,
McKibben's book: "Deep Economy".

Each to his own taste. I agree that locally grown food tastes good--that's why my wife and I garden. But "industrial agriculture" as John Phipps calls it is the reason we haven't had the famines in the world that we used to. So if you have the money and want to buy a McMansion, or a second house in the town where your child goes to college, fine. If you want to buy "fair trade" coffee, fine. If you want to spend time and money getting locally grown produce from community supported farmers, even finer. But don't think you're saving the world.

Immigrants Working Harder

I posted a couple days ago about an article on a California farmer moving his vegetable operation to Mexico. Freakonomics picked up on the bit about Mexicans working harder in California and had about 40 comments on the idea.

I was waiting for my wife to buy basmati rice at a local Indian grocery. Indians and Koreans and Chinese immigrants often get into small business--food, dry cleaning, etc. If the family works 16 hours a day, they can make it. Then I remembered the "consensus" school of American history from the early 1960's. The idea, pushed by Louis Hartz and others, was that emigrants to America left behind much of the class structure of Europe--the lower classes didn't migrate, no money; and the upper classes didn't migrate, they had it too good. So America was populated by the middle class, and hence never had the class war to the extent Europe did. (Oversimplification.)

How does that relate to farm workers from south of the border? Well, when one emigrates north, one leaves behind a lot, family, friends, social structures. One of the less obvious things you leave behind is the whole entertainment industry. Entertainers don't move, they have it good enough where they are (much like the European upper classes). And you need a critical mass of people to support native entertainment industry. So I'd venture that the entertainment industry for any group of immigrants is smaller and less active than in their home country. So immigrants work harder in part because they have fewer entertainment outlets for their time and energy.

"A Naive Country Boy"?--Me? No, Marion Barry

Effie Barry, Marion Barry's third wife, died of leukemia yesterday. The Post had some interesting pieces on her (she memorably maintained her poise during Marion's drug bust trial).

This is towards the end of the interview piece, talking about Marion, the divorce (after he got out of prison) and his remarriage:
"The reality is that the two of you will always be connected because you are parents of this one child. . . . You try to develop a positive dialogue; and I must say it was certainly a challenge because his wife, Cora, had, at one time, been one of my best friends. . . . I will always respect him as a man of great intelligence. . . . I will always have a great deal of concern . . . for him. Because underneath it he is this very naive country boy. . . .

I can see it. It was and is part of his con, the "bama" who's still on the side of the underdog, who's fighting the good fight and putting it over on the "man". Another James Curley (famous Boston pol/mayor/convict/Irishman). But you can't use it in a con unless it rings true as well.

British Bureaucrats Screw Up Farm Payments

To the best of my knowledge, FSA has done better than the Brits:

The handling of a £1.5bn computerised farm payments scheme by two senior civil servants is condemned by MPs today as "a masterclass in bad decision-making" which could land taxpayers with a £500m extra bill. A highly critical report from the Commons public accounts committee accuses Sir Brian Bender, then permanent secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, of being "largely responsible" for the fiasco, which left tens of thousands of farmers without any cash from the European Union.

Some interesting points that pop up as sidenotes--apparently the EU has a small payment cutoff--like $100 or so, which the Brits didn't use, giving them lots of small claims to pay. And the EU is able to fine the British over their failures of administration. The British fired some of the people responsible, but had to pay compensation for not fully following the rules (sounds familiar). And most familiar of all--a top guy is criticized for not having the nerve to stand up to the leaders and give them the bad news.