Rants Blog

The Common Agricultural Policy

Maybe I'm missing something but isn't giving 45,000,000,000 (45 Billion) Euros a year to subsidise EU farmers totally crazy?
There are 2 completely separate problems here.
1. Why can't farmers just get another job. If there isn't enough money in farming then change profession. The politicians talk as though a Farmer is something fixed in stone. But how do you define a farmer? Could I call myself a farmer and get paid for doing nothing, or for growing something nobody needs? Even if you decide that they do need subsidising, paying them money to work when we don't need their products is doubly crazy because it would be much cheaper to pay them to do nothing. Not only that, they get paid more, the more they grow, so they can not only subsist but get rich on making things people don't need. Imagine if we decided to subsidise tech professionals who couldn't make money? Even if this was a good idea, wouldn't it make more sense to give them unemployment benefit than to pay them to make software we don't need?
It all seems to be based on a false conception that farming is this immovable thing that just has to be done and those people engaged in it can't do anything else. And now they're saying - well we admit it's crazy but we have to phase it out gradually. Why? If something is crazy, why can't you stop doing it straight away???
2. The commission has a tiny staff working on supervising the 45 bn euros, hence a lot of it just lines the pockets of the rich. See http://www.fahayek.org/index.php?article=269 and this