Corporate welfare...

Often, the left complains about corporate welfare dished out by Republicans in Congress. Primarily, the socialist left (which loves government subsidies to abortion clinics and public school teachers) claims that the GOP uses tax dollars to enrich their buddies who run large agricultural corporations.

Of course, any person with a shred of desire to live freely and independently abhors government intervention in the economic arena, but in this case I find it interesting to consider how we have arrived at a point where the federal government decides which goods ought be sold in a free market and which should not.

According to Thomas Sowell,

• Back in 1942, the Supreme Court authorized the vastly expanded powers of the federal government under Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration by declaring that a man who grew food for himself on his own land was somehow "affecting" prices of goods in interstate commerce and so the federal government had a right to regulate him.

Could this decision have been the actual birth of the agricultural subsidies that the Democrats tell us are the product of modern Republican cronyism?