You don’t have to be a libertarian to be amazed at the way the government’s many tentacles often work at cross-purposes. The Wall Street Journal reports today on the U.S. milk industry:

My toddlers have recently been having fun with the phrase “liar, liar, pants on fire.” I’d like to set them loose on the farm bill debate in Congress. 

In researching my new bulletin, Milk Madness, the weirdest document I came across was this 2003 note from then New York Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer.

Spitzer was going after retailers of milk for “price gouging,” or charging prices that were “excessive.”

Talk about regulatory chutzpah. The federal government runs a milk cartel system, called “marketing orders,” which has the direct goal of raising prices. A federal price support program and import barriers are designed to raise milk prices. It has been federal policy for 70 years to screw milk consumers for the benefit of milk producers.

And the government of New York is going after retailers for overcharging?

As Congress considers a new farm bill in coming weeks, Cato has launched a web resource, Downsizing the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which offers a menu of cuts to shrink the department’s $89 billion budget by 90 percent.

A nice complement to the Cato pages is an updated farm subsidy database from the Environmental Working Group.

I was catching up on my reading in the International Breastfeeding Journal, and came across a great article by George Kent, a professor at the University of Hawaii.

As a scholarly article, it had no photos. Instead, what made it interesting were the contradictions it revealed in the federal women, infants, children (WIC) subsidy program. This is a $5 billion per year program that subsidizes families with babies, mainly by providing free infant formula.

Kent found that: