Farm Bill

Here's an article that I bet Stiglitz and Wolf would agree upon.  It's about the farm bill, a law passed by Congress with wide-reaching impacts on things like food (and gas) prices, farm incomes, and the social safety net, not to mention trade policy.  The Washington Post editorial is arguing that no policy - or implicitly a more free market policy - might be preferable to the distortions and inefficiencies generated by the bill.  The argument generally goes that farm bills "overprotect" farmers and end up as some form of subsidies (whether directly or indirectly) for large-scale businesses rather than small family farms.

Note that this is the Washington Post, a major national paper that is read primarily by urbanites and suburbanites.  One might anticipate different reactions from the Topeka Capital-Journal, the Sacramento Bee, or for that matter the Roanoke Star, newspapers with lots of readers in farm country.