Vanishing Farmland

Newspapers seem to be telling us that every cornfield is threatened by a Dairy Queen. This media barrage about the crisis of our “shrinking” farmland can be traced to the 1979 publication of Where Have All the Farmlands Gone? by the National Agricultural Lands Study. The NALS report, to which eleven federal agencies contributed, argued that land-use planning and control must be employed to protect valuable farmland from “urban sprawl.” This volume, a collection of essays by a distinguished group of economists including Theodore W. Schultz, Julian L. Simon, and Pierre Crosson, takes issue with the belief that croplands need governmental protection. In opposition the collection as a whole supports two theses: 1) shrinking farm acreage is not a serious problem, and 2) individual choices by landowners in a market setting result in better-organized land use than would governmental land-use planning and regulation. Published for the Political Economy Research Center, Bozeman, Montana

Most people in the United States believe that our environment is getting dirtier, we are running out of natural resources, and population growth is a burden and a threat. These beliefs according to Simon, are entirely wrong. Why do the media report so much false bad news about these? And why do we believe it? Those are the questions distinguished scholar, Julian Simon set out to answer in this book.

"The past two decades have seen the growth of well-coordinated networks of political activists who have managed to obtain hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars for political lobbying. Although federal regulations prohibit such activities, loopholes in the law allow these monies to be masked as private resources. State and federal taxpayers, monies fund the lobbying efforts of private advocacy groups on both the political left and the right.In Tax-Funded Politics, James Bennett argues that governmental agencies, rather than combating theses abuses, aid and abet them in order to increase their own size and scope. Drawing on a broad range of examples, Bennett shows how the ideals of the nation's Founding Fathers have been subverted by molding and manipulating the will of the people through government-orchestrated propaganda. Government agencies, far from being indifferent to self-aggrandizement and the consolidation of wealth and power, are concerned with their own self-interest, whether it is enhancing their budget or supporting a particular political agenda. Likewise, nonprofit entities claim to operate solely in the ""public interest"" but also engage in political advocacy and lobbying activities. But when charities do the lobbying, blatant self-interest is wrapped in the halo of the ""public interest.""Tax-Funded Politics exposes dozens of mutually beneficial arrangements between government and charities involving hundreds of millions of dollars. It then explores their implications. Groups that receive government funds are loath to criticize failed government programs and are advocates for the expansion of the agencies that provide their support. Even charities learn not to bite the hand that feeds them. Although the vast majority of the funds are directed to nonprofit groups on the left of the political spectrum, so-called conservative organizations have also sought and received taxpayers' funds, despite promise to get g"

This paper investigates the impact of international migration on technical efficiency, resource allocation and income from agricultural production of family farming in Albania. The results suggest that migration is used by rural households as a pathway out of agriculture: migration is negatively associated with the allocation of both labor and non-labor inputs in agriculture, while no significant differences can be detected in terms of farm technical efficiency or agricultural income. Whether the rapid demographic changes in rural areas triggered by massive migration, possibly combined with propitious land and rural development policies, will ultimately produce the conditions for more viable, high-return agriculture attracting larger investments remains to be seen.