Are American Farmlands Disappearing?
Simon, Julian L.
I suspect that what lurks behind femininist thinking is a fear of failure and a reluctance to compete on equal terms with men in the artistic and business fields. Unlike the Luces and the...
...Present day Holland, Switzerland, Scotland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Yugoslavia all built their first universities (as did Ireland) after the Middle Ages...
...Furthermore, even if the alleged problem did exist, there is no evidence that it could be solved more effici<'ntly by social planning than by market participants...
...totalurbanized land in the United States is less than three percent...
...Dale McLaren of the G r e a t e r Wabash Regional Planning Commission wrote about the increase in the Mt...
...It seems different, howe v e r , because the mall does not use the land for a g r i c u l t u r e . Yet economically there is no real difference between the mall and whornseat farming...
...It abuts on a railroad siding, is very close to the intersection of two interstate highways, is next to an area already being used for heavy industry, and is even located so that the prevailing winds would blow any odors away from town...
...It wanted Nixon's hide...
...When we became aware of the underenumeration problem in Illinois, we made our own inquiries and were told that similar adjustments were needed nationwide," said Gray and Benbrook...
...as a whole) since 1974...
...And "wasteland" far away from Champaign-Urbana is like land that is not fertile for whornseat-the former will not produce whornseat and the latter will not produce shoppers...
...Before considering this data on farmland 18 TIlE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 conversion in greater detail, a glance at related trends in land use should dispel some of the false perceptions currently obscuring the issue: 1.) The quantity of food...
...Please listen to and study the words of national experts...
...Carmel Newspapers and brought it to my attention, and as a result we wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal...
...The Bureau responded that the 1969 and 1974 c e n s u s e s had underenumerated land in farms...
...Some people seem to want to believe that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and some simply do not know any better than to repeat what they have read or what someone has told them...
...And the scare has not departed with the arrival of Ronald Reagan...
...The Paris agreement was undone, and the Soviets could spring to life in Angola, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Afghanistan, and Poland...
...And even compared with other products, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, the price of food has not been going up and probably has dropped 3.) Trees...
...Under these conditions, no one would ever argue that the land should be required to remain in the production of corn and soybeans...
...Unlike the Luces and the Thatchers of this world, feminists have discovered the perfect subterfuge...
...4.) Recreation land...
...9 Robert Lam, a schoolteacher in Springville, Iowa, owns and operates an 80-acre farm...
...This claim is being fueled by false statistical assertions...
...Marion Clawson of Resources for the Future says straight out: "We're not very worried around here about the loss of prime farmland...
...Then along came data from a 1978 Census of Agriculture, which showed substantial cropland increases rather than decreases for Illinois (and the U.S...
...Such foul behavior is characteristic of highly politicized times, and the times have been highly politicized for most of the past four decades...
...This represents only a microscopic proportion of U.S...
...According to Time, several of them have become gentlemen of letters...
...And the Sturms even offered to put in a special septic system...
...And to this point facts about the enormous Irish achievement in maintaining the tradition of monastic learning during the Dark Ages immediately after the collapse of the Roman Empire is not directly relevant...
...l" Clifton B. Luttrell of the St...
...After the defeat of the Carter Administration, the names of Robert Gray and Carter Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus appeared as prominent functionaries of American Farmland Trust...
...So it is with farmland: I f it is kept from other uses, no other benefits are derived in the meantime...
...9 State Representative Richard Mugalian was delighted to chair the zoning committee of the Illinois House of Representatives...
...Secretary of Agriculture John Block is on record as agreeing with this product of the Carter years, referring to the loss of agricultural land as " a crisis in the making," similar to the energy situation ten years ago...
...We were also confronted at the national level by experts in the field who contended the 1974 and 1978 census showed about an 8-million-acre increase in the land in farms [nationally]," said [NALS officials] Gray and Benbrook...
...Shalimar, Norell, Halston Night...
...The three-million-acre claim is as preposterous as any "official" statistic ever rushed into print...
...Furthermore, each year more new cropland is reclaimed from irrigating d e s e r t s and draining swamps ( " w e t l a n d s " ) than is "paved over...
...flat cerebrum of the Neanderthal: It is a literary mind vivified by the moral imagination, not mystical but reverent...
...And Armagh, the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland, was at one time the metropolis of civilizat i o n . " . . . Item: "Ireland was the only major Western nation that did not build a single university during the Middle Ages," says Sowell, in Race and Economics, citing as authority for this fatuity those eminent medievalists, Glazer and Moynihan (Beyond the Melting Pot), who prudently cite no one . . . . To begin with, and depending upon how one defines "major Western nation," it would appear that Ireland was in good company...
...His intimate knowledge of the treacheries of the human heart would make him an excellent inquisitor...
...Leo Kearney 0 'Drudy, Jr...
...NALS "has built a strong case for protecting good agricultural land," he says...
...M~ddled economics aside, what has led so many p e o p l e to worry about the conversion of farmland...
...These analysts have access to the best and latest data on the topic, and have been charged with painting the most realistic picture possible of present farmland conditions for the president...
...Essential Products Co., Inc...
...As I trust that I made clear in my sentence introducing that quotation, Sowell was making a point about the differences between the Irish and the Jews at the time of their arrival in the USA...
...Those of us who have watched the parade of chiselers move from government into the calaboose in a steady and tawdry parade since Watergate are not convinced...
...Now NALS asserts that the amount of cropland--especially "prime" cropland --constitutes the ultimate public interest in the discussion...
...His two most recent books are The Ultimate Resource and The Economics of Population Growth...
...One cannot be sure, but two reasons come to mind...
...Simon's assertions did not sit so well with Illinois agriculture officials...
...plus $2.00 delivery charge first bottle, 50 cents each additional one...
...Pastoral people not only do not build universities, they don't even build the towns and cities that provide the essential centers from which universities spring...
...What they argue, however, is that the recent rate of farmland conversion marks a major break with the past...
...Finally, Crosson explains why the amenity issue is never discussed openly: _9 . . If much of the concern about the adequacy of agricultural land is really concern with preservation of amenity values rather than of production capacity, why is the discussion typically cast in terms of [productive] capacity...
...According to the reliable Crop Reporting Board, afte: a drop, the amount of cropland harvested rose from just over 290 million acres during the mid-1960s and the early-1970s, to around 340 million acres by the end of the 1970s...
...If Thomas Sowell's slipshod and misleading handling of the Irish and Irish-Americans reflects the level of his scholarship generally, he may turn out to be one of the fastest disappearing pop economists in recent memory...
...These b e n e f i t s must be greater than we can get from farmland in agriculture, or investors would not be willing to convert the land from farmland to other uses...
...In 1979, the C a r t e r Administration established the National Agricultural Lands Study, a joint effort of the Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of Agriculture, with the p a r t i c i p a t i o n of a flock of other government agencies, including eight Departments, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Water Resource Council...
...NALS management responded by applying personal pressure on insiders, and employed various bureaucratic tactics to confute outsiders: I shall describe one of these moves, one which I know firsthand...
...Moreover, the politicization will continue so long as government remains a lush source of influence and boodle...
...Yet Watergate as celebrated today is a mere folk tale...
...The long-run price of food, as measured in the hours of labor that a given quantity of food costs, shows that with each successive year less and less work has been required to buy a bushel of corn...
...Were they out to deny the solon Holtzman usufruct of her office space...
...There was agreement that the land is wet and hence hardly prime for farming...
...20006 tA more complete statement of Clawson's point of view: "'Preservation of prime agricultural land is important, but so is the preservation of land prime for other uses...
...Philip Raup, of the Univermty of Minnesota, sees the issue not as one "Readers might be i n t e r e s t e d in a l e t t e r from American Farmland T r u s t to Robert ) . K e l l y , who had i n q u i r e d a b o u t t h e claims made by the T r u s t in a direct mail package...
...J u l i a n Simon r e p r e s e n t s the thinking of htmself only--we do not know his personal objectives for furthering his positions...
...A letter with eleven signatures, however, objecting to the conversion of "prime farmland," caused the request to be tabled by the County Zoning Board despite being approved by the County Planning Commission, the County Zoning Board of Appeals, and the County Board'szoning committee...
...A shopping mall is similar to a whornseat farm...
...This group has had particular success in achieving favorable zoning laws in such Eastern states as New York, where farmers have obtained lower tax rates for land used for farming at the same time that they have retained the right to sell the land for other uses...
...Two are involved in Christian endeavor...
...But it is said that many salutary reforms came with Watergate...
...SIMON (continued from page 20) t e n a n c e o f amenity v a l u e s . T h i s r e a s o n is likely to be p a r t i c u l a r l y compelling if the objective is to s h a p e n a t i o n a l policies for a g r i c u l t u r a l land p r e s e r v a t i o n . T h r e a t s to o u r ability to f e e d o u r s e l v e s and meet our f e l t o b l i g a t i o n s to a hungry world a r e more l i k e l y to m o b i l i z e a p o l i t i c a l r e - sponse to p r e s s u r e a g r i c u l t u r a l land t h a n t h r e a t s to t h e p l e a s u r e s o f a Sunday a f t e r n o o n drive t h r o u g h the c o u n t r y s i d e . The concern for farmland preservation is not a new phenomenon...
...Men's colognes too, Send for free sample and fragrance list...
...Are they still in their cups...
...One is obviously non compos mentis--what a hot commodity he might be on the campus circuit...
...Louis Federal Reserve Bank finds "there is no evidence that the quantity of cropland is shrinking or that shortages of food are imminent...
...Its only a p p a r e n t support is a faulty Soil Conservation Service re-survey in 1975 of a small portion of the observation points used in a 1967 survey, a sampling which proved much too small to be reliable: Only about 55 of the re-survey points represented agricultural land that had become urbanized and less than 20 of these were cropland...
...9 Victor and Margot Sturm of Princeton Township, Illinois, who raise Arabian horses, requested a zoning change from agricultural to rural estate for a 2.5-acre homesite...
...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 2) Ireland" noted that the Irish "hath had the use of letters very auntiently and long before England," and the medievalist Arsene Darmesteter noted, in what is a common refrain: "The renaissance began in Ireland several hundred years before it was known in Italy...
...After 1979 I could no longer keep count of the carnage but came to the conclusion that Richard Nixon's powers were far more diabolical than his opponents had imagined...
...Unless American women shape up and begin acting like women" should, all suffering and embattled American males should pull a Lysistrata in reverse and begin replacing not their cars but their wives with European modds...
...5.) Housing...
...land...
...L e s t the r e a d e r think my views unusual or out of the mainstream, I wish to conclude by citing some of the nation's leading agricultural economists...
...Agricultural research in particular must be fostered and protected...
...His own answer is a fitting way to end this discussion: "It is all too easy for the layman to generalize New York to the entirety of urban America or to believe that the unique agricultural situation in parts of California is typical of the entire nation...
...The amount of land set aside for recreation has increased, and with it visits to these areas have increased sharply...
...that is, a smaller proportion of our income has been needed to buy farm output with each passing year...
...One may say: "Why not put the shopping mall on inferior wasteland that cannot be used for corn and soybeans...
...Specifically, they claim that the farmland conversion rate has jumped from less than one million acres in 1967 to around three million acres a year...
...The trend here is astonishing: U.S...
...7.) Cropland...
...The NALS people do not deny that the trends described above (aside from cropland) are correctly represented...
...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 of cropland versus built-up land, but rather of cropland versus forest, and adds, "The short-term prospect is for a substantial reduction in the pressure of urban demand on rural lands...
...The reports cast doubt on the scarcity of farmland, but that didn't find its way into the Final Report, which was 180 degrees away from the research input in many c a s e s . " Brewer seems to have just about disavowed the NALS findings: "Efforts to determine the 'nature, rate, extent and causes of reduction in the land base' led NALS into a morass of inconsistent and conflicting numbers that left issues possibly more confused than previously...
...My guess is that a lot of my fellow Americans would find news of these nocturnal patriots equally as engrossing as the p r e s e n t condition of the Watergate rascals...
...The Peril of Vanishing Farmlands" (New York Times...
...The Watergate shenanigans were part of the informal morality of...
...The three-million-acre figure, moreover, is c o n t r a d i c t e d by all o t h e r available evidence...
...The likely rate is only about a third of the amount claimed by the National Agricultural Lands Study, a rate probably no greater but rather less than in the past, and certainly not three times the rate in the recent past as claimed by NALS...
...Do last month's journalistic orgies mean that we are now going to commemorate the anniversaries of every dramatic moment in the 26-month Watergate Spectacular...
...This three-million-acre figure is a political scam...
...In the final days of the Carter Administration there arose an organization called the American Farmland Trust, which began to solicit funds to preserve farmland, but without saying how the money would be used...
...9 And then there are these headlines from a sampling of recent newspaper and magazine stories: "Vanishing Farmlands: Selling Out The Soil" (Saturday Review...
...Some of us know that the major theme of Henry K i s s i n g e r ' s recent memoir is sound...
...SAVE UP TO ON PERFUNES We've created our versions of Opium, Bal A Versailles, Joy, Oscar de la Renta...
...Vienna, Virginia Antony Flew replies: Since I myself only quoted the remark as something which "Sowell makes bold to say" I need accept no responsibility for its accuracy...
...In 1979 the Illinois Farmers Home Administration of the USDA publicized a "loss of 100,000 agricultural acres every y e a r " in Illinois, and on J u l y 22, 1980 Governor James Thompson issued an Executive Order for Preservation of Illinois Farmlands, citing this 100,000-acre figure...
...Taking one thing with another I doubt the Watergate rascals fared worse than any other cross section of American politicians...
...Years ago, various individuals and organizations began to campaign for zoning changes and other farmland preservation laws...
...Perhaps most amazing is that even the amount of "wetlands"--what used to be called swamps--is increasing, even though environmentalists have been lamenting its purported decline...
...Kelly for b r i n g i n g this to my a t t e n t i o n . Rather than refute the logic of Profes,,t>r Simon that you brought to our attention, I would encourage you to consider carefully the findings of the National Agricultural Land,-, Study that will be presented to President Cartel shortly after January 1, 1981 My reasoning on this is quite simple...
...Geological Survey that compared its aerial photography data on land conversion with the Soil Conservation Service materials in four t e s t states revealed major e r r o r s in the SCS findings stemming from misclassification and simple blunders...
...Who commemorates these anniversaries...
...Its preeminent myth is that Watergate was the consequence of the high moralism animating American political life...
...the future...
...I am g r a t e f u l to Mr...
...university faculties abound with such weird appointments...
...Thus, when Census of Agriculture figures published late in 1980 showed that cropland had been rising from 1974 to 1978, NALS quickly arranged for, and widely publicized, an adjustment purporting to show that this increase in cropland was in fact the result of underreporting in earlier years, an adjustment very large relative to the other magnitudes involved...
...Pierre Crosson described the consensus reached at a recent Resources for the Future Conference as follows: "While one should not be complacent about the agricultural land issue neither is it a matter of pressing current national concern...
...On the other hand, the work of NALS represents the collective analysis of some of the most knowledgeable people in th~s country on the issue of agricultural land use...
...He had always been interested in urban zoning issues, and he thought this would be a chance to put some of his ideas to work...
...Keeps Losing Soil to Land Developers" (Wall Street Journal...
...croplands have been clearly increasing r a t h e r than decreasing...
...Stockpiling food in your basement in case of possible calamity may be wise, but you lose the use of the money tied up in the food inventory...
...The American Farmland Trust does not want you, or anyone else, to simply take our word that the loss of American farmland is a real and growing t h r e a t to our national well-being...
...But he soon found the committee's preoccupation with preventing farmland conversion made it difficult to get the committee to attend to any urban zoning issues at all...
...Insofar as liberalism seeks to enslave us to the tyranny of material wants and class envy, it is the liberal who is the New Neanderthal...
...They decided to contact the Bureau of Census in Washington because they could not believe that land in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 19 farms had increased...
...Doubtless manyknew what we all know now, namely: that dirty tricks, abuse of power, exploiting indelicate political intr and cover-ups have in varying d e g r e e s been f e a t u r e s of American political life going back to the time of FDR at least...
...After the resignation of Richard Nixon I used to keep meticulous records of the destinies of his opponents...
...Ask a Lapp...
...food production has been going up by leaps and bounds...
...As World Needs Food, U.S...
...tural alone Prime land is important, but so are all the other inputs in the agricultural production equation...
...Arguably the morality was practiced more broadly than during earlier administrations, though the more I learn about the Johnson Administration 1 begin to doubt even this...
...Corroborating evidence came from the y e a r l y d a t a from the Crop Reporting Board, where no such adjustments are involved, showing substantial increases in Illinois cropland in recent years...
...the forest acreage has about stabilized...
...And where will it all take them...
...American politics...
...To recognize that we live in a world of scarcities is not news...
...Together witla Seymour Sudman in the InternationalRegional Science Review, I have analyzed some of the major procedural problems with the resurvey, most stemming from the fact that the re-survey was intended to throw light not on farmland losses but on conservation practices...
...After the episode was over, Arnold Bollenbacher, Chief of the A g r i c u l t u r e Division of the Bureau of the Census, summed up in a letter, "Even with some decrease in total land in farms, cropland increased in Illinois and in the United States...
...1"7 6o6D0Q0P~000Qo00eQGODQQQ04O0OQ~00O0g004eQQ60I0QQo00O0BQt~0O000006.0OgQ0QQOQO~Q0QO9Q0OO DQe0IQQ9o0OO0oO060QQOUQu~e00QQ0OoQ0~0QoQ~0mQQoQ06~Q~Q4~IQmQQ000 Julian L. Simon THE FARMER AND THE MALL: ARE AMERICAN FARMLANDS DISAPPEARING ? The eco-freaks in our government say yes, but Julian L. Simon says beware of the next political scam...
...It is no accident that much of the push for farmland "preservation" has arisen in such states as Connecticut which are not exactly the nation's granary_9 It is natural enough for gentry to want to view bucolic fields rather than tacky housing developments from their front windows...
...The other reason is that maintenance of capacity is more likely to enlist political support for preservation of agricultural land than main~aontinued on page 40) 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 e r r o r s , and over the years Kirk has confronted each one and all its variations many times...
...Today, there is less scarcity rather than more--in all respects...
...That is hard to predict, but I do have one solution...
...By late 1979 nearly fifty of them had been indicted, convicted, or forced to lie low...
...The result: The latest data show a national decline of 88 million acres in land in farms between 1969 and 1978--an annual rate of 9.8 million acres . . . In o t h e r words, the Census Agriculture Division and NALS produced "adjusted" figures apparently based on a definition change between the 1969 and 1978 cens u s e s , plus an allowance for farms not included in the 1978 census...
...The earlier figures had shown a 639,000 acre increase...
...Envy breeds hate...
...four children "to help me farm evenings and weekends and to have a lifestyle we have all worked f o r . " But Linn County is considering enacting a law that would require Lam to pay a $50 fee and receive county permission to give the lots to his children to build on...
...It goes against my grain to have to say 'Please may I do this with the land,'" he says...
...But that is beside the point...
...The true figure, as we shall see, is one-third or less of that figure--about one million acres per year, which is at or below the average for the decades since 1950...
...The heart of the NALS case is that farmland--and particularly cropland, as distinct from pasture, forest, and other farmland-is being urbanized at an unprecedented rate...
...1000, L'Air du Temps, Chloe...
...Here is how the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation describes what happened next: Ironically, the new information came out of a feud between the Illinois Department of Agriculture and.Julian Simon, a University of Illinois economics professor...
...A U.S...
...Others simply said it is not right to take some of the most fertile land in the world and pave it over, even if this would increase the value and output of that land...
...But I am delighted to have the chance of saying now that it seemed and still seems to me to be at worst mislead...
...One is muddled thinking, a simple failure to recognize that agricultural land provides both commodity values and amenity values, but not in fixed proportions...
...I especially enjoy the hate militant feminists show for such devoted and successful wives as Nancy Reagan and Pat Nixon...
...But more important, however, is that keeping options open costs us real resources...
...The land would be more productive growing whornseat than corn, as shown by the higher profits the whornseat farmer would make as compared with the corn and soybeans farmer, and as shown also by the h i g h e r price the whornseat farmer is willing to pay for the land...
...Actually the pack that lit out after the American President was not animated by moralism at all...
...The preoccupation with the loss of "prime land" seems to involve a fundamental misunderstanding of economic p r i n c i p l e s . Take the example of a new shopping mall, called Market Place, near Champaign-Urbana, Illinois...
...A New York, NY 10005 212-344-4288 Serving Wall Street area since 1895 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 41...
...NALS proceeded to publicize the three-million-acre figure, as well.as many o t h e r dubious c l a i m s - - e v e n though members of NALS's own research staff made it very clear to Gray that t h e i r studies did not substantiate such claims...
...But upon inspection, the adjustment could be seen to be as full of holes as Swiss c h e e s e . And eventually the Census of Agriculture revealed detailed data on the appropriate adjustment showing that land in Illinois farms and in cropland indeed increased from 1974 to 1978...
...Some may argue that we should "keep our options open," because "paving is irr e v e r s i b l e . " In f a c t , it is not...
...6.) Wetlands...
...Personally, I don't mind what they do with their little neuroses, but I do mind their becoming such lousy lovers out of hate and bitterness...
...The mall owners would be delighted to find and buy such land--so long as it were equally conv e n i e n t for s h o p p e r s . But t h e r e is no such wasteland close to town...
...But the rest of us should not have to pay the price...
...Agricultural land use must be viewed in a wider context than agricul...
...Wonderful though this Illinois land is for growing corn and soybeans, it has greater value to the economy as a shopping center, which is why the mall i n v e s t o r s could pay the farmer enough to make it worthwhile for him to sell...
...Have they moved on to high positions in government or at one of the giant corporations...
...Ireland's "universities" were in her monasteries and monastic schools--those luminous centers of intense intellectual life and Western Christian culture whose far-ranging sons almost singlehandedly kept alive Western civilization throughout Europe for centuries after the Roman withdrawal...
...The proposed development was opposed in hearings before the zoning commission and the city council by people who claim that the development would mean a loss of prime farmland vital to the nation and the world...
...9 The Reifsteck family owns as good a piece of potential heavy-industry development land as exists in Champaign County, Illinois...
...he is, however, too charitable a man to perform this function, except in two or three recalcitrant cases where the parties e i t h e r ought to know b e t t e r or are wilfully perverse...
...Toward the end of his discussion of "Urban Encroachment on Rural Areas," geographer John Fraser Hart asks: " I f urban encroachment on rural land is not a serious problem in the United States, then why has so much arrant nonsense been written and spoken on the subject...
...What is news is that with respect to all these farmland-related goods and services our situation has been getting better rather than worse...
...doubtless tenured positions would await him: head of Watergate Studies at Berkeley, Annenberg Fellow in Telecommunications...
...Furthermore, only a portion of the one million acres converted annually is cropland, the r e s t being pasture, wasteland, and so on...
...But more i m p o r t a n t , Crosson notes, "Some of those ostensibly concerned with the adequacy of land as a factor of agricultural production are really concerned about it as a source of amenity values...
...Simon has argued in a number of popular articles that environmentalists have produced "an oversupply of false bad news" about the state of the planet...
...For many, farmland preservation is a front for other concerns as P i e r r e Crosson has pointed out: "Some who argue for preservation of agricultural land to protect productive capacity do so to cloak purely private interests, e.g., some farmers in metropolitan areas who seek to have their land taxed at its value in agriculture rather than at its value in urban uses...
...One of the main agents in whipping up this scare about "vanishing" farmland has been the National Agricultural Lands Study (NALS), a creature of the Carter Administration...
...Any nation that can take pleasure in such trashy displays as "The Dukes of Hazzard" and "The Phil Donahue Show" probably contains enough lunkheads to relish yet more Watergate drivel, and certainly my brethren in the media will look forward to this sort of insane pageantry...
...in other words, that recent history is fundamentally d i f f e r e n t from that of earlier decades...
...Many of those who broke with the informal morality of American politics, pretending it never existed, were sufficiently cynical to rank with any European...
...Why are the amenity [esthetic] issues and the capacity issues not treated separately, as they should be...
...Information on internal criticism of NALS comes from Michael Brewer, head of the r e s e a r c h staff, and is corroborated by another member of that staff...
...Some simply wobbled off and died...
...Farmland Losses Could End U.S...
...Food Exports" (Chicago Tribune...
...Certainly they fared no worse than their congressional opponents...
...Review the historical record: His enemies have come to tragic ends far more often than his friends whose trips to the hoosegow are so celebrated...
...But once Washington politicos jumped onto the issue with both feet, the scale of these activities increased dramatically...
...The more government agencies that back a project, the more confidence the electorate is supposed to have in the project...
...U.S...
...Citing figures from the Census of Agriculture that showed an increase in the amount of land in farms [author's note: McLaren and I wrote about cropland, not farmland] in Illinois, Simon dismissed farmland preservation as "scaremongering...
...To cross him was to put o n e s e l f under the power of some supernatural hangman...
...Americans enjoy more and b e t t e r housing than in the past...
...Some spoke of possible starvation in Julian L. Simon is Professor of Economics and Business Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign...
...On this basis, they questioned what all the fuss ow:r conversion was about...
...not to mention the many other stories from the Christian Science Monitor, Gannett News Service, and the Associated Press, typically reprinted with alarmist headlines in the smaller newspapers across the country...
...at $16.00 per oz...
...In surprising numbers they met with unenviable ends...
...He wants to give a one-acre lot to each of his...
...As the Frenchman Roger Chauvire notes in his excellent history of Ireland: "The Irish monasteries, Clonard, Clonmacnois, Armagh, then later Bangor and Lindisfarne, were the centers not only of spiritual, but also of intellectual, life...
...The Watergate spectacle weakened the American presidency...
...Write to: National Agricultural Lands Study Room 5020 New Executive Office Building Washington, D.C...
...As soon as NALS began to publish its claims of increases in the rate of land urbanization, critics inside and outside NALS asserted that such claims were unfounded...
...Suppose t h a t the corn-and-soybeans farmer who owned the land sold it instead to the producer of an exotic new crop called, say, "whornseat," a hybrid of corn and wheat...
...has been on the rise r a t h e r than on the decline in recent years...
...o o + , , ~ ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 o ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 ~176 o ~ EDITORIAL (continued from page 6) more curious about the present condition of those six drunks from the War for 1508 Flatbush Avenue...
...90 Water St., Dept...
...Even the cynical Europeans believe this myth, and they snicker at us for it...
...The amount of wood being grown in the U.S...
...Revised figures showed that between 1974 and 1978 Illinois' land in farms had declined by 425,000 acres...
...What is objectionable is that Sowell's statement--standing alone, out of historical context, and without explanation--is highly misleading in its obviously intended implications...
...Curious liberals will find, in perusing the Reader, that the Conservative Mind is not the...
...Until comparatively recent times, the Irish were a pastoral people, not farmers or city and town dwellers like their English and Continental contemporaries...
...Appointed to head up NALS was Robert Gray, former aide to Congressman J ames J effords of Vermont, who had once sponsored an unsuccessful farmland preservation bill...
...Others are in retirement, and some prosper on the campus lecture circuit...
...2.) The price of food...
...ing rather than outright false...
...According to the s t a f f member, "The politicos didn't give a damn what the data said...
...This e p i s o d e seems to show a determined urge on the part of NALS to disseminate data showing loss of cropland irrespective of the facts...
...It was Watergate that allowed them to raise themselves to their bogus eminence as democracy's priesthood...
Vol. 15 • August 1982 • No. 8
