Freedom to Farm--Thanks to the Taxpayer : The new bill only changes how the subsidies are handled--and will cost $3 billion more.

Hillary Rodham Clinton should have called her health bill “Freedom to Heal.” Then Congress might have passed it as restoring the free market in medicine. If you don’t believe such a trick would have worked, take a look at the “Freedom to Farm” bill that just sailed into law.

Official propaganda says this bill restores a free market in agriculture, ending 60 years of subsidies and planning. But ask yourself: If this were really true, wouldn’t farmers on the dole and the media be in hysterics?

Of course, and a close examination of the bill backs up this suspicion. The existing scheme, based on New Deal programs modeled on the old Soviet system, is retained in all its essentials. After this bill expires in seven years, the 1949 law that now oppresses us again will be the law of the land.

Not that the new bill is peanuts. With a $47-billion price tag, it allocates even more money to subsidies initially and to crazy new liberal programs. But in seven years, we’re told, price supports and subsidies will be “phased out.”

This farm bill is typical of a Congress that can’t bring itself to cut a dime of federal spending, yet passes reams of “revolutionary” laws promising to cut, slash, abolish and otherwise establish a libertarian heaven on Earth--sometime in the next millennium.

But in the here and now, the bill retains price supports for peanuts and sugar as well as price-fixing for milk. It renews a program preventing 36 million acres from being farmed. And it throws away $1.4 billion on more regulations, $200 million on a Florida swamp and $200 million on “rural development.”

All in all, this bill could have been written by Bill Clinton, which is why he’s glad to sign it. The Democrats particularly like the food stamp and school lunch provisions. Why, you may ask, are these part of a farm bill? Because those who benefit, along with “the poor,” are wealthy agribusinessmen.

Why this bill? Why now? Crop prices are at a 10-year high, and under the current subsidy formula, payments would be low. So by merest happenstance, this bill changes the price-based system into flat subsidy; $3 billion to $4 billion more will be spent for farm welfare immediately.

The bill’s supporters say it eliminates many set-asides, acreage controls and crop mandates. But that would be a glorious thing only if the industry weren’t subsidized and protected from competition. “Freedom to farm”--with other people’s money.

The farm program is one of the oldest federal scandals. The troubles began a century and half ago, when U.S. tariffs were set to favor industry at the expense of agriculture. The policy culminated in an invasion of the agricultural South by former industrial lobbyist Abe Lincoln.

Then, in World War I, the federal government pumped up the price of wheat and other products and tried to keep them that way after the war. That effort failed, and after two devastating recessions in 1919 and 1921, officials turned to more protectionism and outright planning.

By the time of the Great Depression, the Jeffersonian ideal of the independent yeoman farmer was banished. As president, Herbert Hoover set out to keep prices high by subsidies, trade restrictions and planting controls at the very time when market pressures were forcing them to fall.

But Hoover was small potatoes compared with farm dictator Franklin D. Roosevelt. Agriculture has become a virtual ward of the state, with the feds holding more than half of all farm debt. There still are independent farmers, and they avoid Washington at all costs. Agriculture is dominated by subsidized agribusiness, its lobbyists and its pet politicians.

The victims of food socialism are consumers and taxpayers, who shell out billions directly and in the form of artificially high prices every year. Also harmed are the remaining independent farmers, whose livelihoods are threatened by subsidized industrial-scale competition.

That’s why Congress should pass a real Freedom to Farm Act. It would abolish the whole of the existing system and subject the sector to the same competition and price dictates that free industries face. Congress also should stop concocting tricky new ways to prop up big government with misnamed bills.