We should question proposals to provide billions of taxpayer dollars to support an industry that is enjoying record profits

More Subsidies for Prosperous Farmers

By Barry Goodwin

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that farm income in 2013 will be more than double what it was in 2009. The nation’s farmers are enjoying the benefits of high crop prices, massive crop insurance subsidies, and technological advances that have made crops more resistant to drought. As a result, farming’s record level of income far surpasses that of comparable non-farm sectors.

Yet much of the debate over new farm legislation seems oblivious to these facts. The latest farm bill would give farmers even greater subsidies. In 2012, the Senate and the House failed to reach a consensus on a farm bill and instead passed a compromise extension of expiring law. The hope was that the agricultural committees would then develop a traditional omnibus farm bill package of legislation. The extension is set to expire on September 30; House and Senate leaders have pledged to complete a bill this year and the House will hold a markup this month.

Today, as has increasingly been the case since the early 1980s, U.S. farmers are protected from significant yield and price losses by a massive and heavily subsidized crop insurance program. The program offers most producers the option to guarantee up to 85 percent of their projected yield or revenue. The most popular form of crop insurance guarantees revenue and promises to replace yield losses at the greater of the expected price at planting time or the actual price at harvest. As crop prices and farm incomes have increased to record levels, so too have the revenues guaranteed to farmers under these insurance contracts and the subsidies paid by taxpayers.

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Read more: www.american.com

The state of the multilateral trading system

A Realist's View of the Global Trading System

By Claude Barfield

There is great lamentation these days about the state of the multilateral trading system and its institutional symbol, the World Trade Organization (WTO). The Doha Round of multilateral negotiations has now dragged on for twelve years, with no end in sight on major issues. From 2003, when the first breakdown came at Cancun, Mexico, through a further standoff in Hong Kong in 2005, and a huge negotiating defeat after a marathon 2008 session in Geneva, world leaders have executed a political ritual: frantic calls for the "political will" to successfully conclude the round, followed by a total absence of action. Indeed, the greatest damage inflicted on the WTO has come from these feckless and increasingly vitiating global calls for action.

Now, attention is focused on salvaging a "mini" outcome when WTO trade ministers meet in Bali in December. But even this token outcome seems in jeopardy. In a stinging, blunt assessment of the prospects for even minimal success, U.S. WTO Ambassador Michael Punke recently stated that "the picture is grim." In Punke's view (echoed in part by WTO Director General Pascal Lamy), WTO trade negotiators, rather than converging on vital compromises, are moving farther apart on key areas-trade facilitation (customs reform, removal of transportation and regulatory blocks to moving goods and services) minor agricultural trade reforms, and granting free trade access to the least developed nations.

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Read more: www.realclearmarkets.com

We are foolish as a society if we think that social mobility can be sustained without moral formation

Virtue Matters More Than Money

by ANTHONY BRADLEY

Without wise stewardship the fast acquisition of wealth 

will find one quickly living in poverty.

There is such powerful interest in sports being a way out of poverty for many low-income males, especially black males, that we tend to forget about other things, like wisdom, that contribute to success. For many young men and women sports has given them and their families amazing new opportunities to quickly go from subsistence to wealth. However, for many athletes the lessons of stewardship, which are first modeled in the home, were never properly cultivated, resulting in them losing all of their earnings within a short time. Here are just a few recent ones fromBusinessInsider.com:
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When thinking about what sustains success in the long-run we are foolish as a society if we think that social mobility can be sustained without moral formation. Athletes are people who should be treated with dignity and not as commodities to be traded for the sake of wins and tickets sales. 

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Read more: blog.acton.org

Our public debate about religious liberty is missing a clear definition of religion, leading to confusion, frustration, shrill voices, and short tempers.

Is religion a public or a private right?

by Susan Hanssen 

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According to George Washington, religion involved a public affirmation and was a matter of grave public concern. He would have been mystified to hear it discussed as a solitary spiritual experience, a personal feeling, opinion, or preference—something akin to a “high” or a “hobby.” In his Farewell Address, Washington referred to “Religion and morality” (Religion with a capital “R”) as the “indispensable supports” of the country’s political prosperity.

For Washington, patriotism, that is to say civic virtue itself, could not be maintained without reliance on the “great Pillars” of “Religion and morality.” Morality, he argued, cannot “be maintained without religion.” A “sense of religious obligation” was the very foundation of the adjudication and enforcement of public justice.

It takes some real intellectual labor for us in the third millennium to grasp the definition of religion as essentially one of the res-publica, the public things, that ought to concern patriotic men. But it was certainly nothing new for Washington. It was as old as Aristotle or Cicero.

Washington had in his library at Mount Vernon an English translation of Cicero’s great work On Duties, originally written in Latin (De Officis) in 44 BC. In the introduction, Cicero made two things clear: Rights derive from duties, and duties derive from some “doctrine of the supreme good.” What we call rights, Cicero said, are obligations. And he said this not on his own authority as an inventor of the idea, but based on the ideas of the Greeks: “Absolute duty we may, I presume, call ‘right,’ for the Greeks call itkatorthoma, while the ordinary duty they call kathekon.”

Much has been written on the “invention” of the notion of natural or human rights in the eighteenth century, but certainly the American founders did not think of themselves as inventors but rather as defenders of the idea of the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” For them, as for Cicero, if we have an obligation to do something, derived from some doctrine of the supreme good, then we can claim a “right” to do it. “Right” is a secondary concept deriving its force from some prior conception of absolute moral obligation, duty, or “office.”

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Read more: www.mercatornet.com

Europe by Samuel Gregg - "Is this our future?"

Becoming Europe

By Samuel Gregg

Americans see, across the Atlantic, European economies faltering under enormous debt; overburdened welfare states; governments controlling close to fifty percent of the economy; high taxation; heavily regulated labor markets; aging populations; and large numbers of public-sector workers. 

They also see a European political class seemingly unable—and, in some cases, unwilling—to implement economic reform, and seemingly more concerned with preserving its own privileges. 

Looking at their own society, Americans are increasingly asking themselves: "Is this our future?"

In Becoming Europe, Samuel Gregg examines economic culture—the values and institutions that inform our economic priorities—to explain how European economic life has drifted in the direction of what Alexis de Tocqueville called “soft despotism,” and the ways in which similar trends are manifesting themselves in the United States. America, Gregg argues, is not yet Europe; the good news is that economic decline need not be its future. The path to recovery lies in the distinctiveness of American economic culture. Yet there are ominous signs that some of the cultural foundations of America’s historically unparalleled economic success are being corroded in ways that are not easily reversible—and the European experience should serve as the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

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books: www.becomingeurope.com/

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National Review’s John J Miller

 on ‘Becoming Europe’

by SARAH STANLEY

John J. Miller, a national correspondent for National Review, recently interviewed Samuel Gregg about Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future.

Related posts:
Audio: Samuel Gregg Discusses ‘Becoming Europe’ on the Georgene Rice Show
Review: Marvin Olasky on Samuel Gregg’s ‘Becoming Europe’
Audio: Samuel Gregg on WORD-FM discussing ‘Becoming Europe’
Audio: Discussing ‘Becoming Europe’ on African-American Conservatives

Read more: blog.acton.org

The President's fulsome praise of Planned Parenthood ignores its shameful origin in racist eugenics.

The President needs a history lesson

by Robert R. Reilly 

In the spring of 1983, President Ronald Reagan did something highly unusual for a sitting president. He wrote and published an unsolicited article in The Human Life Review, titled “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation.” In it, he denounced the “raw judicial power” by which the Supreme Court had dispossessed the unborn of their inalienable right to life in the Roe v. Wade decision, and mourned the some 15 million lives that had been snuffed out by abortion by that time.

On April 26, 2013, President Barack Obama did something equally extraordinary. He became the first president to address a Planned Parenthood conference. Planned Parenthood is the foremost provider of abortions in the United States. In his speech, Mr Obama celebrated the “quality healthcare to women” that this organization purportedly provides without once mentioning the service for which they are best known – abortion.

President Obama also lauded the organization for its near century of service since “the first health clinic of what later would become Planned Parenthood opened its doors to women in Brooklyn.” Curiously, he neglected to say much else about the origins of the group, except that “for nearly a century now, one core principle has guided everything all of you do – that women should be allowed to make their own decisions about their own health. It’s a simple principle.”

Actually, that’s not quite accurate. The real founding principle behind the group from which Planned Parenthood sprang was purely eugenicist, deriving from Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest.” Perhaps it is best to let founder Margaret Sanger (1883-1966) speak in her own words at length (so as to avoid their being taken out of context).

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Read more: www.mercatornet.com

An English professor's journey from queer theory to Christian faith.

The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert

by Carolyn Moynihan 

In 1997 Rosaria M. Champagne was a lesbian feminist English professor at Syracuse University in New York, specialising in gay and lesbian studies, living with her girlfriend and sporting a butch haircut. Today, Rosaria Champagne Butterfield is a home-schooling mother of four adopted children in Purcellville, West Virginia, married to a pastor of the reformed Presbyterian Church. What happened to bring about this transformation?

Let’s say straight off that it had nothing to do with conversion therapy, or therapy of any sort, useful as those methods may be to some people. Obviously there was a conversion, but one that happened in quite a natural way. Butterfield has written an account of the path she travelled from queer theory to Christ in The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey Into Christian Faith, a frank, confessional story offering many insights into lesbianism and the interface between homosexual activists and the Christian community.

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Read more: www.mercatornet.com