American farmers are pleading for exemptions from President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Republican members of Congress from farm states are working to deliver the relief farmers want. But farmers do not deserve special treatment and should not get it.

Tariffs will indeed hurt farmers badly. Farm costs will rise. Farm incomes will drop. Under Trump’s tariffs, farmers will pay more for fertilizer. They will pay more for farm equipment. They will pay more for the fuel to ship their products to market. When foreign countries retaliate, raising their own tariff barriers, American farmers will lose export markets. Their domestic sales will come under pressure too, because tariffs will shrink Americans’ disposable incomes: Consumers will have to cut back everywhere, including at the grocery store.

Farmers will share this tariff predicament of higher costs and lower incomes with almost all Americans—except the very wealthiest, who are less exposed to tariffs because they consume less of their incomes and can offset the pain of tariffs with other benefits from Trump, beginning with a dramatic reduction in tax enforcement.

Farmers are different from other Americans, however, in three ways.

First, farmers voted for Trump by huge margins. In America’s 444 most farm-dependent counties, Trump won an average of 77.7 percent of the vote—nearly two points more than Trump scored in those same counties in 2020.

Second, farmers have already pocketed windfall profits from Trump’s previous round of tariffs.

When Trump started a trade war with China in 2018, China switched its soybean purchasing from the United States to Brazil. By 2023, Brazil was exporting twice as much as the United States. Trump compensated farmers with lavish cash payouts. The leading study of these effects suggests that soybean farmers may have received twice as much from the Trump farm bailout as they lost from the 2018 round of tariffs, because the Trump administration failed to consider that U.S. soybeans not exported to China were eventually sold elsewhere, albeit at lower prices. The richest farmers collected the greatest share of the windfall. The largest 10 percent of farms received an average of $85 an acre in payouts, according to a 2019 study by the economists Eric Belasco and Vincent Smith for the American Enterprise Institute. The median-size farm received only $56 an acre. Altogether, farmers have been amply compensated in advance for the harm about to be done to them by the man most farming communities voted for.

Third, farmers can better afford to pay the price of Trump’s tariffs than many other tariff victims.

Farmers can already obtain federal insurance against depressed prices for their products. Most farmers report low incomes from farming, but they have a high net worth. The median American farm shows net assets of about $1.5 million. Commercial-farm households show median net assets of $3.6 million. The appearance of low incomes is in any case misleading. Again, according to Smith, families that own farms earn only 20 percent of their income from farming. Even the richest farmers, those with farm assets above $6 million, still earn about half their income from other sources, including a spouse’s employment in a local business or through a rural government job such as a county extension agent. On average, farm families earn higher total incomes than nonfarm families, and their debt-to-equity ratio is typically low.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Trump is unleashing a chaos economy]

None of this is to deny that farmers will suffer from the tariffs. They will. A lot. But so will city people. As will people in industries that use steel or aluminum or copper as components. As will people in service industries and export industries, people who rely on the trade treaties trashed by Trump to protect their copyrights and patents. And anybody with money invested in stocks. And anybody who drives a car or truck.

During the 2024 election campaign, Americans were told, in effect, that no sacrifice was too great to revive the domestic U.S. toaster-manufacturing industry. If that claim is true, then farmers should be proud to pay more and receive less, making the same sacrifice as any other American.

But if a farm family voted for Trump, believing that his policies were good, it seems strange that they would then demand that they, and only they, should be spared the full consequences of those policies. Tariffs are the dish that rural America ordered for everyone. Now the dish has arrived at the table. For some reason, they do not want to partake themselves or pay their share of the bill.

That’s not how it should work. What you serve to others you should eat yourself. And if rural America cannot choke down its portion, why must other Americans stomach theirs?

One of the things that’s becoming clear is the determination of the Trump administration to divide humans living in the United States into two groups (to whom Wilhoit’s Law applies), citizens and immigrants. Actually it is a bit more complicated than that, because some of the legal citizens are, in reality, at best some sort of semi-citizen,¹ but let’s keep things simple for now. What I want to focus on is how incompatible this is with the notion of a free society, indeed with a free society even as those on the political right have historically seen it.

The Trumpists think they have a discretionary right to deport immigrants for wrongthink and wrongspeech, for taking part in a pro-Palestine demonstration, but also for writing a newspaper article, making a social media post, sharing a social media post, even liking one. They think that such people have no right not to be snatched off the street by goon squads. And they think that when immigrants face deportation for wrongthink they should have no right to contest the decisions made about them. The US courts may yet disagree with the Trumpists about these matters, but we’ll see.

Immigrants are people. Sorry for insisting on a truism, but I say it not just to argue that they have rights as humans, but also to make a point about their behaviour. US citizens are people too. And as people do, individuals in these two groups will barter and truck, fuck, form romantic ties, break bread, get drunk together, study together, worship together, share and dispute ideals, like and dislike books, operas, tv shows. Et cetera. You can’t monitor and control the activities of the individuals in one of these groups without monitoring and controlling the activities of the people in the other group who are in millions of cases the counterparties to their transactions and attachments.²

One of the marks of a free society, at least as many liberals and conservatives have insisted, is that it is composed of smaller societies through which much of its life is conducted.³ Associations, clubs, universities, schools, families, and so forth. Those societies have a life of their own and the wider society of which they form a part loses its own freedom and vitality when the state subordinates their inner life to its own purposes. Not that all such regulation is bad: some is necessary for justice and equality and even child protection (cf Brighouse and Swift)⁴. But overdo it and you create not a free society but a totalitarian one. Though immigrants may not be full legal and political members of the big society, they are often full and equal participants in the smaller ones and, as such, they need to be able to argue, express, consent, dissent, voice and exit just as the other members do. The smaller societies can’t function properly if they are composed of some people with rights and some people without them. Every member needs to hear what other members say and when some people can’t express themselves for fear of the consequences that not only destroys the inner life of society but also leaves individuals open to blackmail and exploitation.

As the United States slides into totalitarianism, there’s not much that anyone can say in a blog post that will prevent the worst. But if it is, at least, to stand as a warning to other societies that want to retain such freedom as they have, then we had better notice that the casual assumption that a neat quasi-natural divide can be drawn between citizens and immigrants isn’t limited to the US, it is the routine unthinking blather of politicians in Europe and elswhere, and not just on the extreme right. And if and when the bad times come and the immigrants get targeted, that will harm not just the direct objects of xenophobic policies but also all of the individuals who live lives entwined with theirs, some of whom will doubtless find their own status reclassified.

When James Cameron was serving as second unit director on Galaxy of Terror (1981), he was asked to film an insert of a severed arm that’s being eaten by maggots. The team made a fake arm, covered it with mealworms, lit the shot, and rolled the camera, but the mealworms didn’t move. “They looked completely inert,” Cameron said. “So I thought, well, what would happen if we put a little electrical current through these worms? Maybe they’d jump around a little more.

“So we get all ready to do the shot and two guys I knew who were producers had come up behind me to watch me work because they had heard I was doing some directing. I rolled the camera and when I said ‘Action,’ what they saw was two hundred mealworms all come to life. When I said ‘Cut,’ they stopped moving.

“This must have been tremendously impressive to two low-budget horror-movie producers. I’m sure they ratcheted up in their mind that if I could get a performance out of worms, I probably could work very well with actors.” They hired him that day to direct Piranha II.

(Robert J. Emery, The Directors: Take One, 2002.)

…or How moving fast and breaking things…breaks more than just things

(Crossposted with Inverse Square)

So…it turns out that among his many other sins, Elon Musk, with a boost from the now-unmentionable fact of climate changes, is turning low earth orbit into an overgrazed commons…to the impoverishment of us all. That’s the message of this study, published last week in Nature Sustainability. That work explores the effects of injecting anthropogenic (AKA us) greenhouse gases on the thermosphere—the bit of the upper atmosphere that extends all the way into Low Earth Orbit (LEO, up to 2000 kilometers above the planet).

The TL:DR is that climate change heats the earth’s surface, but cools and shrinks the higher-up regions of the atmosphere. That in turn means satellites in low earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag. Which leads to the following problem: without such drag bits of space junk don’t get slowed down…which means their orbits don’t decay (as fast) and they don’t burn up. As the corresponding author of this work, MIT graduate student William Parker put it in an interview with the MIT news office, “The sky is quite literally falling — just at a rate that’s on the scale of decades…And we can see this by how the drag on our satellites is changing.”

More dead satellites and orbital debris boosts the risk of collisions that knock out still-useful spacecraft. Such wrecks generate more debris, which makes crashes yet more likely, until it becomes too dangerous to try to park a satellite in some patches of space. And when that happens, a global commons will have been tragically exhausted.

Bit of backstory here: the idea of a common is an old one. In practice, it probably dates back to the beginnings of anything resembling hominid society, and as an explicit term in property law (in England, at least) it extends back to the feudal manorial system.

The basic concept is simple, and kind of evident in the name. A common is (in its first incarnation) some bit of land on which the people who live on or around could do something—the ability to use the property for one or more purposes, usually up to some defined limit. For example, someone could hold the right to graze five sheep, or gather some amount of wood, or some similar privilege.

Note the idea of limits—constraints on an individual’s use of a common resource. Our commoner (!) could put five sheep out to nibble…not six or seven or any number they chose. And if it turned out that the already granted rights of pasturage were too much in a bad year, existing rights could be reduced. All of which is to say that on a lasting, well run common property, its use was tightly regulated. If that weren’t so…well that’s where the tragedy comes in. If any member of commons can run as many ewes as they want on a field of grass then the endgame comes fast: the meadow gets munched down to the roots and its carrying capacity drops. Fewer animals can graze and everyone grows poorer.

Historically, lots of commons have avoided this outcome. They have been actively managed and the commoners involved in any given set of rights have policed potentially cheats with great assiduity.

But, beginning perhaps in the 19th century, certainly by the 20th, new kinds of commons have emerged that have proved much more difficult to police. Think the oceans and overfishing, or of the use of air, land, and water as depositories for pollution, or (my current focus) a way of thinking that sees the effectiveness of antibiotics as a kind of commons that can be destroyed by uses that promote antibiotic resistance. And, of course, there is the most common commons of them all: the earth’s atmosphere, in which the tragedy of billions of individual decisions (and national and multi-national corporate choices) is producing profound physical and chemical changes on a planetary scale.

Back to the cooling thermosphere and the rise of space junk. In the study authors’ analysis, less drag leading to longer decay times for debris will reduce the carrying capacity of some or all of the LEO region. As they write, “the worst-case scenario capacity carries many fewer satellites across broad swaths of LEO by the year 2100.”

2100 is a bit of ways out. But the problem is already here. Why? Because of Musk and a handful of other overgrazers of this space-commons. Here’s what’s happening, again, as told to the MIT news office:

Their predictions forecast out to the year 2100, but the team says that certain shells in the atmosphere today are already crowding up with satellites, particularly from recent “megaconstellations” such as SpaceX’s Starlink, which comprises fleets of thousands of small internet satellites.

“The megaconstellation is a new trend, and we’re showing that because of climate change, we’re going to have a reduced capacity in orbit,” [MIT associate professor Richard] Linares says. “And in local regions, we’re close to approaching this capacity value today.”

In other words: as Musk and his minions are attacking the US federal gov’t efforts to combat climate change, he’s running his space-grab as fast as he can, to the point where we may lose access to the territory currently used by everything from earth sensing satellites, the Hubble Space Telescope, both the International Space Station and China’s Tiangong sation, not to mention a wealth of communications satellite (including Starlink, of course).

The response is obvious, previewed in the history of the commons. Resources that belong to/are valuable to society (or societies) as a whole need to be closely regulated. We have to make sure that the asshole in the third cottage down doesn’t ruin it for everyone by grabbing the temporary advantage of running some extra livestock on the pasture. In other words: we have to tell Musk and his ilk that a common resource like low earth orbit—is not one in which they can do whatever they want.

Of course, the idea of regulating global commons is exactly the antithesis to the Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” credo, the one Musk embodies, of course. But as that techno-capitalist view takes hold it’s important to recognize how unsustainably extractive it is in many domains—and how much can be broken.

I have little hope of anything moving to protect LEO as a resource under the current regime, nor any of the other crucial modern commons. But here’s the thing: nature, the material world we inhabit, gets its vote too. It doesn’t care if MAGAts think climate change is a hoax (or rather, that elite MAGAts are happy to suggest it’s a hoax to squeeze the next dollar out of a declining resource). Elementary physics tells us that if we go on as we are now, the troposphere will shrink and satellites will crash. That’s reality. I hope that we can minimize the cost of our education at the hands of this most explicit of teachers. But pay we will.

And in the meantime…open thread.

Image:  Thomas Sidney Cooper, Shepherd with Sheep,  1868

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