The advantage of being a pundit over a politician is that you get to say things that would make your constituents ride you out of the Capital on a rail but you still get invited to all the best DC cocktail parties.

So I went looking for all the studies showing that advertising made people eat more junk food.  I couldn’t find any.

What McArdle’s really saying is that food advertising isn’t worth the billions of dollars that get spent on it every year.  Who knew?

Our society’s reliance on corn - it’s either in or somehow involved with practically every foodstuff on the market - means the removal of growers’ subsidies would cause a dramatic spike in the price of food. All food. There’s something to be said for scaling back producers’ reliance on corn, but merely halting the subsidies would be monumentally stupid.

Our drinks are sweetened with it. Our “breaded” products are created with it. Our livestock is fed with it (and non-corn crops are fertilized with the processed feces of corn-fed animals).

And it’s not just food, either; corn byproducts are used for…well…everything: http://www.ontariocorn.org/classroom/products.html

Is it possible that in that first quote she’s trying to say that getting rid of corn subsidies won’t, as some fear, make food prices rise through the roof, because producers could make up for them by raising prices only a small amount, enough to make the average yearly food expenditure go up by $33 per person? 

(It was way harder to say that in an intelligible way than I thought it would be.)

Who knew The Devil’s Advocate was employed by Archer Daniels Midland…

...that was a tease.

Okay, it was a very small tease…

Jesus, is this finally the week that everyone on the internet realized Megan McArdle was an idiot?

Jesus, is this finally the week that everyone on the internet realized Megan McArdle was an idiot?

You mean most people didn’t know that ‘til now???

Suspecting my google-fu was terrible, I enlisted the support of others.

So Megan McArdle turned into Jonah “my readers will write my column for me” Goldberg? That explains so much.

Shorter MM: “Golly, this makes no sense to me, therefore it makes no sense to anyone.”  Another example of the Stupid not knowing they are stupid—c.f., Palin, Sarah.

Seriously, this fruit is hanging so low that it’s hard not step on it.

McCardle, who styles herself a libertarian, is actually a Rotarian socialist: if large incumbent corporations want to do something (e.g. agribusinesses asking for massive and permanent public subsidies; junk food chains advertising to children), in her view the government should bend over backwards to enable it. Non-corporate welfare? Not so much (check out this article about McCardle and the Teabaggers in the amusing, if not always SFW, ExiledOnline).

So stupid statements like the ones quoted aren’t particularly surprising—lots of conservative pundits (Bobo Brooks comes to mind) enter into Straussian bargains. What continues to amaze me, though, it that The Atlantic has made her the tentpole columnist for its business coverage.

And how stupidly disingenuous is McCardle? She just got pwned by Ben Domenech. That’s some major-league stupid.

Our society’s reliance on corn - it’s either in or somehow involved with practically every foodstuff on the market - means the removal of growers’ subsidies would cause a dramatic spike in the price of food. All food. There’s something to be said for scaling back producers’ reliance on corn, but merely halting the subsidies would be monumentally stupid.

I think that $10 billion would be better spent on food stamps or on assisting actual small farmers.  And subsidies could always be phased out over a period of time.  Unfortunately, agribusiness states have a stranglehold on the electoral process, especially in the presidential election.

Well, having clicked over to Exiled Online, I now know that anti-healthcare types are wrong because they’re fat, and therefore unpatriotic, nay, enemies of the American state.  The anti-bailout types are also wrong because they’re fat.  And Megan McArdle is wrong because she’s too tall for a chick and a slut.  Oh, and all fat people are chicks, and fat chicks are unfuckable, and that makes them meanies who go to tea parties…or something. 

impressive

McCardle, who styles herself a libertarian, is actually a Rotarian socialist: if large incumbent corporations want to do something ... , in her view the government should bend over backwards to enable it.

It took me a while, but during the 90s I came to realize that MOST libertarians fall into this camp when it comes to economics.  At least mid-western Ohio libertarians.

It’s shocking how much government intervention they want when it comes to protecting/promoting corporate interests, and how they almost adamantly REFUSE to see it as government intervention.  It was one of the things that finally led me to dump libertarianism as a viable philosophy on life because, at least as expressed around here, it appears to be more of a neo-feudalism than anything I might associate with the Enlightenment values of liberty.

Well, having clicked over to Exiled Online

You were warned—the site (especially that sidebar) isn’t SFW.

Megan McArdle is wrong because there was a gigantic conflict of interest concerning her reporting about the Teabaggers. Exiled Online is deliberately offensive and non-PC with its satire, but they were the first to point out how she (and Santelli) are connected to the various Koch family wingnut welfare enterprises.

It took me a while, but during the 90s I came to realize that MOST libertarians fall into this camp when it comes to economics.

Yeah, that’s pretty much when I realised it, at least as far as capital-L Libertarians are concerned. “Rotarian socialist” is a term I heard from an actuall libertarian who believed in those Enlightenment values of liberty you mentioned.

The thing about markets is that they really do tend to reward a certain kind of efficiency.  If advertizing didn’t work it would be seriously inefficient, giving non-advertizers and edge and driving those companies that piss away profits on advertizing out of business.  The mere existence of commercial advertizing is testimony to its effectiveness at getting people to buy shit.  This is the sort of insight a free market advocate should not need to have pointed out to her.

Ever wonder why Big Pharma spends so much money on freebies for doctors, ranging from pens to three day weekends at exclusive resorts?  Possibly the marketers for drug companies are a collection of weapons-grade dumbasses.  Possibly all that crap gets doctors to prescribe drugs they wouldn’t have chosen based on a simple comparison of scientific evidence.

We can eliminate agricultural subsidies.  Great:  high fructose corn syrup won’t be so cheap!

Yay! *happy dance* This would be a fabulous thing.

In fact, IMO, HFCS should disappear off the face of the earth. It is a major, if not the major, contributor to the US’ so-called “obesity epidemic.”

It is a more-than useless food additive - it’s killing us.

Wow, this is right up there with Bill O’Reilly’s “There are 10 times more people in the US, so that’s 10x more accidents, etc., so of course we have a shorter life expectancy than Canada.”

It’s the week for basic math fail.

I don’t get that post. Is she arguing for or against agri subsidies, because if she’s arguing for ending them, I can agree to that. We should have put an end to subsidies decades ago. Our food supply isn’t in peril to justify the costs and worse, the economic pressure on our border with Mexico.

I think that $10 billion would be better spent on food stamps or on assisting actual small farmers.  And subsidies could always be phased out over a period of time.  Unfortunately, agribusiness states have a stranglehold on the electoral process, especially in the presidential election.

I don’t support these subsidies; I just think, as you say, that it’s best to phase them out over time - or, better yet, to encouraged a greater diversity of crops by subsidizing farmers that innovate. Other crops are subsidized, too, but corn is a lumbering giant among them.

“I don’t get that post. Is she arguing for or against agri subsidies…”

She’s saying whatever will get her sent a check.  I don’t think she really dwells too much on the particulars…and probably doesn’t care as long as the checks don’t bounce…

For someone who pretends to be an economist, McArdle is being incredibly obtuse here: the money spent on subsidies is chicken feed (ahem. in the old days when chicken feed was cheap) compared to the misallocation of capital that badly-targeted subsidies encourage. Here’s a hypothetical: investment A, which yields 5%, and B which yields 3%. Obviously if I have $250 billion to plunk down somewhere I should go for investment A, and get $12.5 billion a year compared to only $7.5 billion a year for B. But now factor in a $6 billion a year subsidy for B, and now it returns $13.5 billion. As long as I have legislators in my pocket, I’d be a fool to invest ianywhere but B. (And once invested in B, a fool not to keep the legislators in my pocket). So each dollar of subsidies results in the misallocation of more than $40 of other money.

The corn subsidies that lead to HFCS (and those^&*%* crazy “biodegradable plastic” bags and stuff—how sick is it to burn petroleum so that you can grow food that you then turn into plastic that can’t be recycled) are a particularly weird twist, because the corn syrup is only cheaper than sugar because the US keeps domestic sugar prices way above world levels. If not for HFCS subsidies, the sugar import barriers would be much less politically acceptable, which would in turn seriously disrupt the balance of power in sugar-growing southern states…

With all due respect, one thing that this recent crisis has shown us is that economists behave exactly as the theory predicts they will—they say what they’re paid to.

The actual unemployment rate in this country may be nearing twenty percent.

Jesus H fucking Christ.

But there’s something interesting about that.

“Interesting” and “serious” are the two pundit words that mean “I have absolutely no idea what the fuck I’m talking about, but I am ENORMOUSLY impressed with how clever and tough-minded I am.”

There’s something to be said for scaling back producers’ reliance on corn, but merely halting the subsidies would be monumentally stupid.

That would be an interesting argument. It’s not the one McArdle made.

Devil’s Advocate is right, but because of Paul’s point, my take on corn subsidies is that one should end them quickly—and middle-class and poor citizens should have their incomes directly subsidized until the shock of the change is managed. They are, after all, the only ones disadvantaged, right? Subsidies only present a policy problem if one cannot or will not grant direct aid to the working classes. If you don’t have that mental or political barrier, there’s really little you can’t politically fix.

HFCS contributes to diabetes and increases the death rate. Chet is wrong. Also, hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, grass is green, and two and two is four in a base-10 system.

teac: In fact, IMO, HFCS should disappear off the face of the earth. It is a major, if not the major, contributor to the US’ so-called “obesity epidemic.”

Also, IMHO, it has the least desirable trait in any foodstuff: It tastes awful.

Chet, the problem isn’t that HFCS is poisonous—no one said that. The problem is that an excess of sugar is bad for you. You missed the point completely.

if not for HFCS we’d simply consume way more table sugar in our foods, and pay way more for them to boot.

If those foods were more expensive, then we wouldn’t eat so much of them, right? When we subsidize unhealthy foods to drive the prices down, people will eat more of them.

The poster Chet quoted and contradicted said nothing that contradicted the idea that, in essence HFCS is sugar. Chet failed to draw the correct conclusion from his own premises in said contradiction. What he said above is irrelevant. If he had insisted 2+2=4 in the first post and then insisted that 2+2+0=7 in contradiction with another post, he’d still be wrong.