Barone on Milk Politics
Michael Barone comments on the milk fiasco. The problem isn't lobbying, which is otherwise known as the right to free speech and to petition government, he argues. It's pro-stasis (my phrase) big government:
The problem here is not free people; the problem is big government. More specifically, it's a big government program set up during the New Deal whose purpose was not to stimulate economic growth and competition but to freeze the economy in place and stifle competition. Remember that the New Dealers believed that the Depression showed that free markets don't work and that economic growth was a mirage.
Franklin Roosevelt on taking office in March 1933 faced a deflationary downward spiral, and, to his credit, he stopped its momentum with an otherwise cockamamie scheme called the National Recovery Act, which set up 700-some industry codes barring price and wage cuts. NRA was foundering in May 1935, since it was obvious that everyone was gaming this ridiculous system, and Congress was uncertain to reauthorize it when the Supreme Court unanimously declared it unconstitutional.
Unfortunately, Congress kept passing freeze-the-economy-in-place legislation, including the dairy provisions of the farm bill. One in four Americans then lived on farms; they were a big constituency, and they were hurting. Things are different now. Only 2 percent of Americans live on farms. Our economy grows and grows and grows, and we realize, thanks in large part to the late Milton Friedman, that the Depression resulted not from the inevitable defects of free markets but from certain specific policy mistakes that we can, unless we take leave of our senses, refuse to remake.