Schumer Milks an Issue

Senator Schumer has sent a letter to the secretary of agriculture complaining "Dairy farmers in New York and across the country have been suffering from a crisis of extreme low milk prices throughout the year." He announed the letter with a press release referring to the "unprecedented dairy crisis." Yet for Mr. Schumer, a milk price crisis isn't unprecedented; it's almost as regular as a trip to the corner store. As this New York Sun editorial pointed out, Mr. Schumer issued another press release complaining about low milk prices back in 2003; back then, he wrote, "It boggles the mind that USDA could just decide to disregard the law, and let milk prices plummet." When Mr. Schumer isn't complaining about low milk prices, he is complaining about high ones; the Sun editorial reports that back in 2004, he sent the Justice Department a letter asking it to protect consumers from milk prices that had increased 23% over the course of almost a year. It's another example of what we'd call the arrogance of central planning; the Harvard College, Harvard Law School educated Mr. Schumer thinks he knows what the price of milk should be, and that with the right enforcement and subsidies from government agencies, he can set the price at a level so that no dairy farms go out of business and no consumers have to pay more than the minimum necessary to keep all the dairy farms in business. If Mr. Schumer's static view of the economy held sway, we'd all still be getting up at dawn to milk cows. In fact, the reason Mr. Schumer keeps having to send out alarmist press releases about milk prices is that government efforts to set prices never work as well as the self-correcting, supply-and-demand mechanism of the free market.