Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
A Cultural Case for Capitalism: 9 of 12 — Berry vs. Salatin
A Cultural Case for Capitalism: 9 of 12 — Berry vs. Salatin
Jun 14, 2025 1:20 AM

[Part 1 is here.]

Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, details how the growth of government-corporate cronyism during the past 120 or so years has been largely a phenomenon of the socialist left. Wendell Berry misses this crucial historical insight in his running critique of capitalism, and his missing it draws him into flatly inaccurate claims, as when he asserts that “the United States government’s agricultural policy, or non-policy, since 1952 has merely consented to the farmer’s predicament of high costs and low prices; it has never envisioned or advocated in particular the prosperity of farmers or of farmland …”

This makes it sounds as if the government is largely uninvolved in agricultural markets, letting the winds of the free market blow wherever they wish. It’s true that the U.S. government has moved away from buying and destroying food as it did under FDR in the Great Depression, a statist attempt to prop modity prices while countless Americans went hungry. But even since 1952, and in a dizzying number of ways, the American government has been busy erecting all manner of protections for American agriculture, from fat subsidies on rice and other grains to import quotas on sugar, price supports on milk, and a long-running policy of paying farmers and ranchers to idle parts of their land.

The most recent version of the U.S. farm bill as of this writing, passed in early 2014, runs to over 600 pages of bureaucratic busyness—and keep in mind, this is only the additions and modifications to existing U.S. agricultural laws and regulations, not the sum total.

Despite this sort of meticulous involvement in the agricultural economy, family farms have gone bankrupt by the hundreds and thousands over the years, often in waves. Some of this is just natural market forces at work, but government policies also have contributed, and in ways that Berry’s sweeping talk of “sentimental capitalism” obscures rather than illuminates.

A clearer analysis can be found in the writings of Gene Logsdon and Joel Salatin, agrarian authors and family farmers who champion environmentally sensitive agriculture and the blessings of robust regional food networks, but who also give detailed accounts of how their chosen pastoral lifestyles are under constant attack from big government working hand in glove with special interests to limit the economic freedom of small farmers. Jay Richards and I lay out their arguments in a chapter of our ing Ignatius Press book The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom that Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot. Here, I’ll just touch on some of their main points on this score.

Salatin is a well-known face in locavore circles, having been featured in the popular documentary Food, Inc. and in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In Salatin’s book Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, the Virginia farmer shows in disturbing detail just how much liberty has been stripped away from food producers, agrarians choked by government bureaucracies and bureaucratic policies that often appear designed to eradicate small operations.

Logsdon is similarly damning in his critique of the federal government’s bull-in-a-china-shop interference with regional farming markets. In The Contrary Farmer, he explores how Washington policy has drawn small farmers into excessive borrowing and into putting patches of land better suited for other crops into corn, thus diminishing the agricultural and cultural diversity of whole swaths of America. The economic effect on the retail level is to shrink opportunities for obtaining a rich variety of local produce in places like rural Iowa.

So, is the answer more government interventions and manipulations of the market to repair the consequences of the previous interventions and manipulations?

When it’s framed that way, it sounds obviously silly, but opponents of economic freedom are either too shrewd or too confused to put it so baldly. Instead, they talk about the woebegone American family farmer and the need for Washington e alongside him and protect him from the greedy and predatory capitalists, those faceless elites who send their lackeys out to push all those good folks off of their land. Anyone who has read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or seen the old John Ford film adaptation can play the scene out in his mind.

What this trope misses is that Uncle Sam is often the unseen culprit, driving the family farm out of business with a web of regulations and market manipulations that tilt the playing field in favor of corporate agricultural.

Berry talks about the little guys, the “rabbits” lacking holes in the capitalist system. But where the little guy in the developing world most often lacks a “hole” to escape from market predators is in his lacking secure property rights.

Internationally, most peasant farmers have no hope of getting secure title to the land their family has farmed for generations, since whatever local tribal chief who’s in favor with the country’s national government usually can do whatever he wants with the land. This isn’t capitalism. It’s the absence of a crucial ingredient of capitalism, property rights.

The property rights problem is only the tip of iceberg. The poor of the developing world have been walled out of the formal economy by a thicket of regulations and bribe-seeking bureaucrats that few poor people can ever surmount.

Peruvian development economist Hernando de Soto explores this in his indispensable work, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. As he explains there, the problem for the global poor isn’t too much freedom and capitalism; it’s too little. This lack, he argues, is what has held the poor back in so many parts of the developing world. Where the poor have gotten property rights, the rule of law, and access to wider circles of productivity and exchange, they’ve taken off economically. Berry seems oblivious of all this.

[Part 10 is here.]

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Where criminal justice reform meets the redemptive power of work
According to a recent study by the Rand Corporation, “more than 2 million adults are incarcerated in U.S. prisons,” with roughly 700,000 leaving federal and state prisons each year. Of those released, “40 percent will be reincarcerated.” It’s a staggering statistic—one that ought to stir us toward greater reflection on how we might better support, empower, and equip prisoners in connecting with social and economic life. How might we reform our criminal justice system to better help and support these...
How we participate in God’s own work
“This is what I have observed to be good,” the Preacher says, “that it is appropriate for a person to eat, to drink and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given them—for this is their lot” (Ecclesiastes 5:18[NIV]). “Toilsome labor” is work that is incessant, extremely hard, or exhausting. That doesn’t sound all that appealing, does it? So why does the Preacher say such labor isgood? Because, he...
From Sunday Stalwarts to the Solidly Secular, the strange mix of American religious groups
In America, we have a problem with religious labels: they no longer fit. As a devout evangelical, I always cringe when I hear the label used—mostly for political purposes—to include a range of heretics, political grifters, and nominal Christians who haven’t been to church in decades. But I also tire of hearing the term “nones” used as a synonym for atheists. The reality is that most people in Western Europe consider themselves to be “Christians,” they are less religious than...
Radio Free Acton: Entrepreneurship in Guatemala; Upstream on the future of the arts
On this episode of Radio Free Acton, host Caroline Roberts speaks with Jonathan Porta, co-founder of merce platform UTZ Market in Guatemala, on his experiences in developing his business and on entrepreneurship in Guatemala. Then on the Upstream segment, Bruce Edward Walker talks to David Marcus, New York correspondent for The Federalist on the future of the arts. Check out these additional resources on this week’s podcast topics: Check out Utz Market Learn more about sustainable development and effective poverty...
What difference does reaching the middle class make?
Too often, advocating for economically sound policies is dismissed as extraneous to the life of a Christian. Faith leaders may see improving the lot of those living in this world as worthwhile but, fundamentally, outside the Christian’s mission. But if they understood the difference these policies make for “the least of these,” they may reconsider. It may be a cliche to say that those in the West take for granted the kind of daily pleasures and amenities denied much of...
Alejandro Chafuen in Forbes: The Moral Aspects of Money
Acton’s own Alejandro Chafuen appeared in Forbes to discuss monetary theories from the ancient Greeks to today’s crytocurrencies. The following is an excerpt from Chafuen’s essay, titled Moralists and Money: From Gold to Bitcoin. For the full article, readers may click here. Monetary topics are some of the first economic issues to be studied with some rigor. Since the first writings by the Greek philosophers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Hesiod and Xenophon, and until the 16th century, the moral questions,...
FAQ: What is the ‘U.S.-Mexico Trade Agreement’?
The United States and Mexico renegotiated the terms of their free trade agreement, President Donald Trump announced this week, replacing NAFTA with something he dubbed the “U.S.-Mexico Trade Agreement.” Here are the facts you need to know. Why did the U.S. negotiate a new trade agreement with Mexico? President Trump promised to renegotiate NAFTA during the 2016 presidential campaign, seeking more favorable terms for the U.S. auto industry and manufacturing sector. As of this writing, Canada has not agreed to...
Harry Potter: Venture capitalist
I recently read the first Harry Potter novel to my six-year-old son Brendan, then watched the film with him. It was all the fun I hoped it would be: he is just the right age for it — excitedly asking what is going to happen next and jumping and cheering at the end. As typically happens, I can’t stop at just the first one, so I’ve been watching the rest of the films with my wife Kelly. (I may read...
Review – Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century
^This is a guest post for the Acton PowerBlog. By Gleaves Whitney Some years ago, the bestselling biographer David McCullough outlined the “missing history” of our nation’s capital – the histories that had yet to be written. Among the people he believed merited more in-depth study was Michigan Sen. Arthur Vandenberg. In Hendrik Meijer’s latest biography, Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century, McCullough’s es true – and then some. No less mentator than Cokie Roberts,...
How Switzerland honors the Protestant work ethic and Catholic subsidiarity
In the U.S., Labor Day weekend celebrates the work ethic that made this nation the most prosperous in human history, and federalism is enshrined in our constitution. But Switzerland – so often overlooked by the West – may have much to teach us about how to honor and embrace the profound influence of the Protestant work ethic and Catholic subsidiarity. At Acton’s Religion & Liberty Transatlantic website, political scientist Mark R. Royce discusses how aspects of Switzerland’s little-discussed political system...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved