On August 6, the US Senate’s Agriculture Committee rejected the latest version of the federal government’s quinquennial “farm bill.” I say “quinquennial” because Congress normally passes this legislation every five years, but it’s still operating on the 2018 version and has been arguing on a new version since 2023.

The major hang-up this year seems to be over a Republican plan that would require state governments kick in for the cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, aka “food stamps”). Democrats want a two-year delay on that requirement (most Americans don’t understand that SNAP is a welfare program for farmers, which is why it goes in the farm bill; feeding poor people is just a better-sounding excuse).

There’s also a set-to over the idea of “year-round E15,” under which gasoline with 15% ethanol could be sold year-round instead of only during certain months. That would mean bigger subsidies for corn farmers to produce stuff that isn’t food, pollutes the air, ruins older engines, and makes newer engines more expensive.

The “farm bill” concept is 93 years old, and it’s as bad an idea now, when only 1% of Americans work in agriculture, as it was in 1933’s first round of New Deal legislation, back when that number was 25%.

We keep getting better at producing more food with less labor, but apparently buried deep within the US Constitution there’s an amendment obligating American taxpayers and consumers to ensure that anyone whose great-grandfather wore overalls and drove a tractor gets to make a living and have a career doing the same thing. I can’t find it, but it must be in there somewhere, right? Otherwise, why does Congress spend more than $70 billion a year to make it so?

I don’t hate farmers — I come from a farming family and grew up on a farm myself — but I do think that some tough love would do them good. Not just moral good, material good.

Taxpayer subsidies won’t change the fact that even as American consumers pay more for food, American farmers earn less for growing that food. The whole idea behind the “farm bill” — that politicians in Washington are, or ever could be — better than free markets at deciding what gets grown and sold — is nonsense.

Instead of a “farm bill” every five years, why not try five years of free trade?

For nearly a decade, US presidents (of both parties) have screwed American farmers out of access to foreign markets by putting tariffs on foreign crops coming in, triggering “retaliation.” US agricultural exports to China fell from $38 billion in 2022 to $8 billion in 2025. The US now runs a “trade deficit” in agriculture, importing more than it exports.

Ditch the “farm bill,” end the tariffs … and let’s eat.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In the month celebrating 250 years of red, white and blue, Americans were seeing plenty of red — and not just as part of commemorative trifectas or midterm forecast maps.

Red-baiters based in red states (or the financial districts of blue ones) have a wave of actual reds in power to push against.  Once, the best opposition they could hope for were such fellow travelers as Reds director Warren Beatty, who as biographer Peter Biskind notes “was no Communist but empathized with the idealism of the American left” (and whose production “reflects his ambivalence”).

In 2026 they are able to point to candidates who can win elections (if only within the bluest of blue electorates) affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America collective, which dropped a manifesto in mid-July proclaiming a need for “aggressive wealth taxes” to bring about the day when the whole sectors of “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses.”

On August 3 alone, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page offered “A Brief History of Wealth Creation” from John Steele Gordon, chiding “many on the left, unable to distinguish between wealth aggregation and wealth creation,” immediately above Allysia Finley judging “the socialist agenda” to be “a sham” (and not just because it attracts “relatively affluent people” who “dress like hobos”).

In July’s Journal, Karl Rove called for not falling for “a seductive tale” reducing life’s woes to the machinations of “nasty villains with evil plans” who “can be beaten” by ballots for ruthless representatives (like the narrative he helped provide for George W. Bush?), while Obama staffer Rahm Emanuel deemed efforts by “socialists who led the charge to defund the police, open the borders, abolish prisons, release violent criminals onto the streets and degrade the flag” to be just as counterproductive as their efforts “to turn safe Democratic states and districts a darker shade of blue” at the expense of winning purple areas. (In fairness, the socialists might spare the Stars and Stripes.)

Even former card-carriers Joshua Muravchik and Ronald Radosh took their ex-comrades to task in 2025.  Those who “would transform the economy from private enterprise to public ownership, but — unlike communists — only through persuasion and legislation, not violence and coercion,” a viewpoint for which they take pains to note they had both been true believers, “must choose between democracy and socialism” when the former cannot yield enough consensus for the latter. Thus, “the two of us made peace with democratic capitalism” while “the DSA has clearly made the reverse choice.”

There’s something to be said for socialists being forthright about their most radical ideas. In contrast, as Roderick Long observes, free-market libertarians have perennially treated theirs as “esoteric doctrine … confined to scholarly studies and movement periodicals.”  In a previous era, the sort of rhetoric in the DSA program would have only been shown to the general public accompanied by a South Park-style disclaimer on how “this is what socialists actually believe.”

Yet the DSA’s vision of how “the political and economic system under which we live is built on private ownership and profit at all costs” leaves out many of the same complications absent from Gordon’s “brief history.”  Half a century before Radosh made that “peace with democratic capitalism,” he filled a book with the help of a very different coauthor, “firm believer in laissez-faire capitalism” Murray Rothbard.  In A New History of Leviathan, Radosh and Rothbard’s joint introduction explained how they and a contributing roster of leftist and libertarian historians traced how the “economy dominated by giant multinational corporations” in the years leading up to the bicentennial had followed, not from “fierce winds of competition,” but from efforts in which “sophisticated reformers sought to stifle” just such remnants of “a freely competitive economy” — preferring instead to “mold the government into a mighty instrument of monopolization and cartelization.”

Getting the dust off the shelf of books by A New History of Leviathan‘s generation of New Left historians, and carrying their analysis forward, will show how much both economic innovation and well-being for the masses are being held back by the assumption that current concentrations of wealth are the result of an inherent conflict between the two, and not by a distorted conception of both.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Red All Over? It’s Not So Black and White” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, August 5, 2026

“Attorney General James Uthmeier is putting the Roman Catholic Church on notice,” the Orlando Sentinel reports. “[I]f church officials take taxpayer funded vouchers for their schools, they should accept vaccine exemptions for students, too.”

The “school choice” movement in the US supports tax-funded “vouchers,” targeted tax credits, and “charter” schools, on the theory that giving parents more options on where, how, and by whom their children are taught isn’t just a good thing, but a thing that government ought to be, and can legitimately be, involved in.

Unfortunately, the real effect of that kind of “school choice” is to turn all the available options into carbon copies of the “public” school system it supposedly helps parents and students escape.

According to the Sentinel article, half a million Florida students use the state-issued, taxpayer-funded vouchers to exercise “school choice,” including nearly 83,000 of Florida’s 94,000 Catholic school attendees.

So far as I can tell, Uthmeier has never publicly declared a formal religious affiliation, although he cites generic “Christianity” as underpinning America’s Constitution and system of government.

The country’s founders disagreed, stating clearly in 1797’s Treaty of Tripoli that “the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”

Beyond his basic advocacy of Christianity, though, Uthmeier apparently considers his opinion on Catholic religious requirements more authoritative than the opinion of, um, the Catholic Church and the institutions it operates. Per the Sentinel piece, “Uthmeier, citing the Catholic Catechism, Pope Leo and scripture, argued Catholic doctrine does not allow its schools to reject vaccine exemptions for religious reasons.”

I’m neither a Catholic myself, nor well-educated in Catholic doctrine, and have no opinion on what that doctrine might imply about vaccination, but what we have here is not really a religious disagreement. It’s just Uthmeier announcing that, since the government pays the piper (with its subjects’ money), the government calls the tune.

Nor is the problem solely about religious schools. Any school that accepts taxpayer money finds strings attached to that money. We’ve already seen that happen with “private” college and university education.

When the GI Bill, Pell Grants, and government-guaranteed student loans started funding students at those “private” institutions, various government requirements on everything from accreditation to curriculum to race and sex discrimination came with those students and that money. The result: In terms of learning (as opposed to name, prestige, etc.), there’s probably little difference between attending most “private”  versus “public” colleges or universities.

As soon as any activity starts getting its FUNDING through politics, its OPERATIONS become subject to the same politics.

For decades, the closest you could get to avoiding that problem was to homeschool, and even then government often stuck its nose into your choices. Now several states have added homeschooling to their “school choice” funding options … as long as the homeschoolers follow a government-approved schedule, use government-approved curricula, and administer government-approved tests.

While Uthmeier’s vaccine diktat inflames “separation of church and state” arguments, its only real solution is “separation of SCHOOL and state.”

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY