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Amost every other day, no matter how hard I try to avoid it, I read or see something about yet another phase of the farm crisis.
It's hard not to feel sympathetic when you see the pictures and read that the family has been on that farm for three generations, and now they can't repay their loans, and a traditional way of life is disappearing, and so on and so forth.
Then I look at Salida. It used to be a thriving railroad town with shops and two roundhouses, until the Denver & Rio Grande switched to diesel locomotives and abandoned most of its narrow-gauge lines. Railroad employment dropped from 500 to about 50. A traditional way of life disappeared. But did any flatland farmers volunteer to pay higher freight rates to maintain that traditional mountain way of life?
More recently, nearby Leadville went through the same experience. Climax Molybdenum had 3,000 men working in 1980, and was shut down in 1983. You want tradition? Leadville had been a mining camp for 125 years -- but did any farmers express the remotest bit of sympathy for the unemployed hard-rock miners?
No more than they did when the Crystal White Laundry of Greeley went bankrupt in 1968. And it represented a long family tradition, in that my grandfather was a laundryman, as was my father. If there's some reason to support the family farm when it goes bankrupt, there ought to be reasons to support all family enterprises.
But no government agency found any cause to bail out my dad, or to continue a family tradition of getting up at 5 a.m. six days a week to fire up the boiler. (And believe me, I am grateful for this.)
So much for sympathy. The farmers haven't extended any. Why do they they deserve any?
Consider how farmers get into trouble. They borrow more money than they can repay. Most of them started down this path a few years ago, when land prices were appreciating at double-digit rates. They figured they could just keep borrowing against rising land prices.
In essence, they were indulging in real-estate speculation. Now that the bubble has burst, they argue that there is some sort of public obligation to use tax money to repay their loans.
All manner of scoundrels speculate in real estate. But only the farmer insists that his losses be covered from the public treasury -- even the rascals who subdivide in the mountains haven't become that brazen yet.
The farmer wants us to share his losses, but he doesn't share his profits, not even with his employees. Farm work pays worse than any other kind of labor. Agriculture generally manages to be exempt from all forms of minimum wage legislation -- or any other law that might protect farm workers.
See if you can name another industry where it would even be an issue whether its workers had access to sanitary facilities while they were on the job. In fact, these days many companies even provide a receptacle and a chemical analysis. While we're at it, see if you can name another industry that pays lower property taxes than agriculture does. Or one that receives more research from the federal government.
In Colorado, agriculture uses about 85 percent of the state's water supply, and most of this agricultural water is highly subsidized. The farmers use this cheap water -- which we all help pay for -- to build up surpluses of crops that there is no market for.
Meanwhile, cities and industries that need water for some sensible and productive purpose can't just buy some of the water that the farmers waste on surplus crops. No, the cities and industries have to develop expensive new water supplies. More rivers dry up, more dams go up, the fishing and the scenery continue to deteriorate.
We do this to protect some speculators who pay rotten wages, hustle every conceiveable tax break, and demand our sympathy even though they've never wasted a dollop of pity on anyone else.
I must confess to an admiration for the farmer, though. It's clear that farmers aren't stupid. Not as stupid as the rest of us, anyway.
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