A Zinger from Wendell

Yesterday I picked up Home Economics by Wendell Berry to begin my alternative readings in economics series.  I flipped to the essay titled “A Defense of the Family Farm” in which he gives a particular variety of professors this stinging rebuke,

Perhaps (the bad advice of experts) could be dismissed as human frailty or inevitable bureaucratic blundering – except that the result is damage, caused by people who probably would not have given such advice if they were themselves in a position to suffer from it.

Serious responsibilities are undertaken by public givers of advice, and serious wrong is done when the advice is bad. Surely a kind of monstrosity is involved when tenured professors with protected incomes recommend or even tolerate Darwinian economic policies for farmers, or announce (as one university economist after another has done) that the failure of so-called inefficient farmers is good for agriculture and good for the country.

They see no inconsistency, apparently, between their own protectionist economy and the “free market” economy that they recommend to their supposed constituents, to whom the “free market” has proved, time and again, to be fatal.

Nor do they see any inconsistency, apparently, between the economy of a university, whose sources, like those of any tax-supported institution, are highly diversified, and the extremely specialized economies that they ahave recommeneded to their farmer-constituents.

These inconsistencies nevertheless exist, and they explain why, so far, there has been no epidemic of bankruptcies among professors of agricultural economics.

Whew! Don’t hold back Wendell!