Opinion by Kyle A. Lohmeier
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced a plan to make $12 billion worth of money stolen from all of us available to farmers. The reason for this is because those farmers have fallen upon hard times; not because of drought, or flooding, or blight or pestilence, however, but because of their own government’s deleterious actions. Of course, I’m talking about the escalating trade-war Trump kicked off for no discernible reason at the outset of his presidency – China has now responded by imposing steep tariffs on American agricultural products. Turns out, China was the single biggest customer of American soybean farmers; not anymore. Now, growers of soybeans and other targeted crops are left with fields full of busily-growing plants no one wants to buy. So, to offset the financial pain this will cause those farmers, the government is using some bookkeeping tricks to pull $12 billion out of a massive pool of red ink.
“Officials say they will be using a Depression-era program, the Commodity Credit Corporation, to secure money from the U.S. Treasury and will not need to ask Congress for the funds,” NPR reported.
It would be easy here to point out the circular absurdity of first hurting farmers by starting a trade war and then bailing them back out with taxpayer money; in fact, many already have done just that.
“(the trade war) is cutting the legs out from under farmers and White House’s ‘plan’ is to spend $12 billion on gold crutches,” NPR quoted Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse as saying, rather sassily.
What most others, and certainly not Mr. Sasse, won’t so readily point out is that this entire issue is just another glaring example of the fact that government is the biggest problem most people have, if it isn’t, in fact, their only one.
The reason Trump was so hot to impose tariffs on foreign imports is because the Chinese government, among others, imposes tariffs on products the US exports to them. This serves to make the end-cost of the product higher to Chinese citizens while putting money into the national government’s treasury. So, Trump retaliated and imposed tariffs upon Chinese imports to the US, which will make the end-cost of those products higher for us consumers while putting some money into the treasury. Now, China has retaliated by expanding the list of things it imposes a tariff on to include a huge variety of US agricultural products. The resulting price-increase of those products in China makes them non-competitive with similar goods from other countries that China isn’t imposing tariffs upon. With no one to sell the products they’ve already planted to, this was going to mean crippling losses for America’s farmers, losses that will now be offset with money stolen from the rest of us.
The important thing to see here is that at every single step of the way, it is the existence of states and governments that are causing everyone problems. It’s only because this armed gang with a monopoly on the legal initiation of violence we call “government” exists that it has the power to extort those trying to sell their goods or services across an arbitrary line in the dirt we call “national borders.” Government causes problems and then works to try to “fix” them by doing more government stuff, taxing and oppressing innocent people to pay for an ever-increasingly expensive series of boondoggles. At what point will it become apparent to all that government itself is the problem and therefore cannot ever be part of the solution?
Government is always the biggest problem most people have, if not the only one. We have an armed gang ruling us and it has the power to do just about whatever it wants with impunity. That this is no way to live should be glaringly obvious; and certainly this most recent bout of absurdity we’re witnessing now ought make it even more so.
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