House conservatives, led by Representative Mark Meadows (R., N.C.) and the Freedom Caucus, torpedoed the 2018 farm bill last month. As well they should have. While they sank it mainly for tactical reasons related to immigration reform, this legislation deserved to founder on its merits. This $867 billion, five-year behemoth was choked with goodies for growing some crops and not growing others. In short: business as usual.

 

A reformist, pro-market, Trumpian GOP Congress should know better. As the Senate now crafts its own such measure, it should follow New Zealand’s example and separate farm and state. Facing national bankruptcy in 1984, Auckland’s former Labour government totally extricated itself from agriculture, save for food-safety inspection and relevant trade diplomacy. After farm subsidies ended, handout-addicted growers learned to compete internationally. And they thrived.

 

If that ideal is beyond reach, the least a limited-government-oriented Congress should do is restrict federal payments to actual farmers who — imagine this — till soil and harvest crops. Such checks should reach only those who earn less than, say, $100,000 annually.

 

Alas, the U.S. Department of Agriculture currently pumps gravy into well-heeled areas that have not seen a tractor since they last staged Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! For fiscal years 2015–17, these outlays to individuals, businesses, and other entities reached:

Urbanites also gleaned agro-largesse. While these cities are less uniformly affluent than the garden spots above (e.g. zip code 33109 — Fisher Island, Fla. — is America’s most prosperous), they are concrete jungles, where the wind does not come sweepin’ down the plain:

 

All told, in fiscal year 2017 alone, 958,700 recipients scored $13.2 billion in farm supports, including 5,921 entities whose payments exceeded $250,000 each. These folks alone hauled in some $3 billion.

 

These facts and figures are from Open the Books (OTB). This Chicago-based non-profit aims to place every dime of government spending on line, in real time. I am proud to serve on its advisory board.

 

Soon after addressing Manhattan’s Gatestone Institute last month, OTB president Adam Andrzejewski told me: "Our data show that the farm-subsidy program became so lucrative that wealthy investors piggybacked on a growing government program and added farm subsidies to their investment portfolios." The next installment in OTB’s Oversight Report series arrives next month. It’s titled "Harvesting U.S. Farm Subsidies."

 

Beyond rich communities, loaded people also enjoy ag checks, thanks to taxes pried from the pockets of bus drivers and waitresses. These government-funded celebrity farmers include NBA star Scottie Pippen, media mogul Ted Turner, Tony Award winner Bruce Springsteen, rocker Jon Bon Jovi, and raving anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.

 

One need not even be alive to collect these bailouts. According to a November 2011 report by then–U.S. senator Tom Coburn (R., Oklahoma!), "In July 2007, GAO found that USDA paid $1.1 billion over six years to 172,801 deceased farmers." This outrage has shriveled but not died. "Between 2008 and 2012, $10.6 million was paid to farmers who had been dead for over a year," The Economist reported in 2015.

 

Democrats and Republicans defend this extravagance as a desperately needed tool "to save the family farm." But that exalted institution is more relic than reality. Ma and Pa’s farm of yesteryear largely has yielded to today’s massive agribusiness facilities. Simultaneously, the percentage of Americans who cultivate the earth full time has plummeted from 38 percent in 1900 to 2 percent today.

 

Perhaps the Smithsonian should fund a dozen family farms as, essentially, open-air museums of agriculture. Those so inclined could see how family farms once looked — complete with wandering chickens, Billy Bob riding a combine, and Betty Ann milking Daisy, the cow. With the family farm thus preserved for eternity — like Colonial Williamsburg — the remaining farm subsidies should be drop-kicked into the nearest thresher.