Nebraska Republicans are champing at the bit to join red states’ assault on clean meat:
Jeanne Reigle, a livestock producer southeast of Madison, and a 2024 legislative candidate, also spoke at Thursday’s news conference [announcing new regulations against “lab-grown meat”]. … The only way that “fake meat” will go from a niche market to a mass market, Reigle said, is if the government subsidizes the process. She said that would mean “putting us out of business.”
“With that in mind, the thing that keeps me up at night and scares me thinking about the future of our children, our grandchildren, is that the government could get involved and have more control over this new so-called ‘food,’” Reigle said.
Reigle and her family have collected at least $2,597,822 in federal farm subsidies over the past 30 years. Animal agriculture has gotten $59 billion from the USDA, with hundreds of billions more in subsidies for livestock feed. The federal government pays for meat and dairy industry marketing campaigns, shields factory farms from liability for environmental damage, pays corporations millions of dollars to kill poultry flocks en masse by overheating and suffocation, and maintains a multibillion-dollar slush fund to bail out factory farmers. Last month, the USDA announced a larger investment in “meat and poultry processing capacity” ($110 million) than federal agencies granted to alternative proteins research in all of 2023 ($81.9 million). Asking the government to ban clean meat because you don’t want government control over the food system is like telling Congress to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.”
Factory farming is one of the most subsidized industries in the United States. When you account for the externalities it causes to public health and the environment—and the costs it passes on to Medicare and Medicaid—it probably costs taxpayers upwards of $100 billion per year. If clean meat received even a fraction of that in public funding and posed a threat to factory farming, then the meat industry would simply be losing on a level playing field. If Reigle were a “true conservative” like she says she is, she would tell cattle ranchers to pull themselves up by their bootstraps instead of running to the government and crying for help.
One of the biggest misconceptions in American politics today is that Republicans are the party of small government and free markets. On issues that might hurt established industries, like taxes and environmental regulations, Republicans are pleased to pull out their Reagan and Friedman and give long boring speeches at stuffy think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. But when it comes to things where the free market position might cost them support from their culture-war-manic base and moneyed backers—like immigration, trade, clean meat, and even online gambling—there are no sweeter words in the English language than “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
“One of the biggest misconceptions in American politics today is that Republicans are the party of small government and free markets.‘
No, this is nowhere remotely close to one of the biggest misconceptions. It doesn’t make the top 30.
It is *of course* true that Republicans are FAR from perfect on this score.
But it is even more true that they are FAR FAR FAR better than the Democrat party, they of Kamala Harris’ “anti-price gauging [sic] laws”. 🙄
Republicans relative to Democrats are far and away the party of smaller government and freer markets.
Of course they could and should be even better. But to claim that that is one of the biggest American political misconceptions today is just ridiculous, misleading hyperbole.
The government is a giant Eds and Meds scam, that's Democrats baby.
Even the Defense Department is left coded now, a trifecta!