During the Second World War American wool producers could not produce as much as the military needed for uniforms. In 1954, with the nation mobilized for the containment of communism, Congress decided wool production should be stimulated with subsidies financed by duties on imported wool and woolen goods. Hence the National Wool Act.
Time passed. Synthetic materials came along. The Cold War was won. And still the wool subsidy survived–until it received the attention of Jonathan Rauch, a gimlet-eyed reporter for the National Journal. The wool subsidy then became a symbol of the mindless immortality of government programs, and in 1993 Congress voted to phase it out. But the import duties remained, producing hundreds of millions of dollars for the Treasury each year.
Now, there is demand-side government and supply-side government, and Washington features both kinds. In demand-side government, groups demand programs, and government provides them. In supply-side government, the government supplies programs that call into existence groups that benefit from the programs, groups that then work to preserve and, if possible, enlarge them. The origins of the wool subsidy are shrouded in the mists of history, so it is unclear whether this was supply-side or demand-side government or a bit of both. In 1954 wool producers presumably were paying attention and showing proper gratitude to the legislators who created the subsidy.
In 1955–the date suggests a supply-side dynamic–the American Sheep Industry Association was founded. It has 110,000 members and an annual budget of more than $5 million. It is headquartered in Englewood, Colo., but it has found, which is to say it has hired, a friend in Washington. She is Fran Boyd, a lobbyist who (as reported by David Hosansky of Congressional Quarterly) says, “There’s a feeling on the Hill that the sheep industry got dealt a pretty tough hand.” The tough handling was the phasing out, after four decades, of subsidies that sometimes amounted to $200 million annually, and paid sheep ranchers up to $150,000 annually.
Compassion, meaning the prevention or amelioration of pain, is the core value of contemporary liberalism, and hence of the Democratic Party. But Democrats have not cornered the market on compassion. Consider the example of Sen. Larry Craig, a Republican from Idaho, where the deer and the antelope play and lots of sheep work at making wool. Idaho is among the most conservative states. After the 1994 elections, the governor, both senators and both congressmen were all Republicans, for the first time since the magic year of 1954.
Craig, who is in his first term, is about as conservative as they come. In 1994 the American Conservative Union rated him a perfect 100. His rating by the liberal Americans for Democratic Action was zero. The National Journal rated him tied with his Idaho colleague, Dirk Kempthorne, as the most conservative senator. But he and Sen. Max Baucus joined to put the National Sheep Industry Improvement Center into the farm bill. Baucus is a Democrat from Montana, Idaho’s neighbor and another state well stocked with sheep.
The law says the Center shall “promote strategic development activities . . . to maximize the impact of Federal assistance,” and shall “optimize” this and that, and shall work on “infrastructure development” for the sheep industry, and shall “empower” the industry to “design unique responses” to the industry’s “special needs,” and shall “adopt flexible and innovative approaches to solving the long-term needs” of the industry. It shall do all this with a revolving fund starting with $20 million in public funds and up to $30 million in coming years, plus private funds.
Craig stresses that the cost is a small fraction of what the wool duties continue to generate. Baucus justifies all this with a principle as capacious as Montana: “It’s helpful to support all American industries generally.” Well, Democrats generally are shaky about the distinction between the public and the private. But conservatives like Craig are supposed to think more clearly. Lobbyist Boyd says of the new National Center, “I think it’s the kind of thing you look to for an industry that no longer has any support whatsoever as a direct payment.” Oh. So, an industry not getting a direct payment is such a novelty, and such a victim of manifest injustice, that it must be compensated by some other payment. And the president who signed the farm bill says, “The era of big government is over.”
Of course the National Center is not big. As a portion of the public sector, neither is Amtrak or public broadcasting or the arts endowment or ethanol subsidies. Even cumulatively, these and scores of other little undertakings do not amount to much of the government. But the mentality that produced the National Center is the big reason that the public regards the government with disdain and itself with a measure of self-loathing.
It is a mentality of simultaneous industriousness and laziness, of earnestness and frivolousness. It involves the unsleeping pursuit of advantages for friends, and slothful refusal to think about what are and are not proper functions of government. This mentality produces severe dissonance. It is dissonance between the rhetoric of limited government–the rhetoric of the public and the political class alike–and the actual expectations of the public and the behavior by the political class that the public rewards with re-election. The result of this dissonance is cynicism all around. That is unchanged after nearly 500 days of the Congress that was supposed to change things.
