The Dairy Cliff in America: An Alice in Wonderland of the Planned.

A journalist from the land of fiat money and central banking sat down this week and, no doubt with a straight face, wrote the following about the American ‘dairy cliff’:

As if the “fiscal cliff” and the long-suffering farm bill weren’t enough, Iowans may soon face a new dilemma — a “dairy cliff.”

If Congress fails to act in the handful of weeks it has left in its lame-duck session before adjourning for Christmas recess, the nation’s dairy programs for farmers will expire Jan. 1.

The effects won’t be limited to the dairy industry — retail prices for all sorts of dairy-related products could soar. U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has predicted the price of milk could rise to $6 a gallon, just as almost all Americans’ income taxes are scheduled to increase …

“That’s why the dairy cliff is similar to the fiscal cliff, because if nothing is done, in January the USDA’s price support level could be so high that the price the government will offer for things like cheese and butter will be about double what the current market price is,” Galen told The Gazette. “So if you wanted to buy cheese for your pizza company or a large supermarket chain, you’d be competing with the government.”

Roll the Laughing Policeman song. 

A theme of this blog is how our Western planned economies derive from Soviet styled planned economies, dependent as they are on planned lives: not capitalism. One person in two in America receives some form of State benefit: it’s the biggest welfare state in the world. The West is now so far from laissez-faire capitalism no one in the Fortress of Legislation knows what it is anymore; it’s a myth they were told to be scared of by the progressives who stand at the front of our school rooms. The only opinion I might be changing, slightly, from reading the above, is rather than referring to the West as semi-police states of forced altruism, I’m starting to think the mob has voted in a world approximating more a childish version of Alice in Wonderland, and we are all living in a Politician’s tantrum. The consumers of Iowa are being financially gutted by their politicians: what in the wonderland are those politicians thinking.

Oh silly. Thinking, of course not: policies like this don’t come from thinking; they come from emoting. That’s the problem.  And while on rural matters, don't forget this post.

The United Welfare States of America.

Another of my themes readers will have noticed is the (huge and increasing) size of the state spend in Western nations, many of which are approaching an irresponsible - because of its economic, philosophic and moral implications - state spend that is half the spend in the entire economy: this theme is logical, given it is because of this we’ve had such complex, draconian semi-police state tax and enforcement legislation stripping our personal freedoms, forced on us. But how does this then explain the United Police States of America sinking under its own hubris of Keynesian debt? There is a mistaken notion, particularly from the Left, America doesn’t have universal health care (despite Medicare being, from memory, their biggest single spend), thus it is falsely perceived they have no welfare state, and so that once great, once free, nation is constantly cited by the Conspiracy of the Caring - because if you ask 'the Left', only the Left care - as the bedrock of cruel capitalism. (The same capitalism, where it has been allowed its state shackles to be loosened, that has given the West, in the context of history, a higher standard of living than any era before us.)

All lies, of course, as childish and stupid as the taunt thrown at me on Twitter this week, and by two grown, middle aged men from the MSM, no less, that ‘Libertarians don’t like people’: apparently, as with caring, only the Left have some type of monopoly on 'liking people' – Rand wept. I shall be dealing with the confounding notions on the caring society soon, but for this post just want to point out America is as much a Gulag of Forced Altruism, with the creeping cruelty that denotes, as the rest of the West. First, the US with its pork barrel politics and lobbying is crony capitalist corporate headquarters of the Western world, and as I’ve written before, crony capitalism is to laissez faire capitalism what sea horses are to horses. But also, even I’d not realised just how big their welfare state actually is: the irresponsibility and immorality of US politicians and voters is every bit as bad as in Europe. Small wonder the IRS is one of the most ruthless IR’s in the world, and the United Police States of America states the case pretty well. From US analyst John Mauldin’s latest e-letter:

Two Workers for Every Social Security Recipient

●      As of 2012-06 the civilian labor force was 155,163,000.

●      As of 2012-06 there were 111,145,000 in the private workforce.

●      As of 2012-06 there were 56,174,538 collecting some form of SS or disability benefit.

●      The ratio of SS beneficiaries to private employees has thus passed the 50% mark (50.54%).

Think about that a minute. There are now half as many people getting some kind of Social Security benefit as there are workers in private employment paying into Social Security. And the trend is clearly advancing. This cannot be sustained. And solving the Social Security problem is the “easy” part of the budget debate. Health care is far more difficult.

We read that one in eight families is now getting food stamps and that over 50% of US families get some form of government check each month, while the percentage of workers in the private workforce is shrinking. There is a limit to how much you can take from out of the private sector and still have a growing sector to take something from.

Remember, austerity is not an ‘option’ that politicians can choose, or not, anymore, for more and more western countries as they are culled by the immutable truth of mathematics: ultimately, austerity is not an option at all; austerity is simply a fact of the real world when you are broke.

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Blog Posts Coming Soon:

Legislating Orwell’s Slogan of the Police State, 2 + 2 = 5, Into Actual Tax Law. We've Done it.

The Bride of Gramsci – Deborah Russell, Tax Lecturer, Massey University, and the Supposed Caring Society. … Mother-load post.

Rural Sector Warning – The Great Stagnation Thesis.

Stay tuned …