North Star Writers Group

Once upon a time, ethanol was nothing to be concerned about. It allowed a few energy and agricultural companies to be environmentally correct, a few Washington politicians who came from the Midwest to shovel some pork-barrel spending at their constituents, and a few farmers to financially benefit. And that was about it. But ethanol – and more to the point, politicians' recent inexplicable obsession with subsidizing it and forcing it upon us via mandate – is now threatening to affect the entire U.S. economy, acting as the biggest stealth tax increase we have ever seen and hitting every one of us directly in our grocery bills.

Thanks to ethanol mandates and subsidies from Washington, corn farmers are diverting substantial portions of their crop so as to reap the profits. This, in turn, leaves less available to use for food – unless we compensate by clear-cutting some forest to create more arable farmland, which the environmentalist lobby will never allow. Supply and demand have their inevitable effect, and voilá, $4.25 for a box of corn flakes that had been $2.99. This may not seem like much, but the same price increase for a gallon of gasoline would automatically invoke knee-jerk screams by Congress of "price gouging" from "Big Oil." Funny - we never hear any similar screams about Big Corn.

Cattle ranchers and poultry farmers, who use corn feed for their livestock, are already feeling the pain from these price increases. And there have been protests in Mexico, as the main daily food staple of the poor is corn tortillas. Any ethanol-mandated price increase in corn hurts them very badly. (So much for liberal "compassion" for the needy.) And corn is in more products than many people here realize, thanks to the substitution of high fructose corn syrup for granulated sugar in most sweetened products. Everything from soda pop to canned fruit to breakfast cereal to that cob of sweet corn you eat this Fourth of July will cost you more. Whatever you may save in gasoline costs will be more than eaten up (pun entirely intended) by the concomitant rise in food costs.

And another thought – what civilization with a brain converts its food supply to fuel? All the energy in the world isn't worth it if it comes at the price of starving a portion of the population. Pricing food out of one's limited financial reach is just as bad as snatching it from one's hand.

Furthermore, the savings about which ethanol fetishists crow don't even exist. Ethanol will actually cause gas prices to increase, as all the infrastructure that processes, transports and dispenses petroleum-based fuel will have to be replaced, retro-fitted or just plain built to handle alcohol-based fuel. For example, the liners of gas station underground tanks get eaten away by the alcohol in ethanol. Eventually it will leach out into the ground and then the water table. Therefore, the station owner must replace the entire tank or have an additional ethanol tank and pumps installed. Where do you think the money will come from to pay for all of that? Right. The expense will get passed along to the consumer as much as possible.

Now follow that back up the supply line through the tankers that transport it (and ethanol is much tougher – and therefore more expensive – to haul in a safe, stable fashion than gasoline) to the factories that will refine it. The total expense will be staggering, and you will be paying it at the pump as well as at the supermarket.

And all for a fuel that offers no substantial improvement in mileage efficiency, while consuming more energy to produce than gasoline from crude oil. Oh, this is a government program all right! It bears all the classic hallmarks – waste, expense and no practical benefit.

If I may now broach a question that may seem almost sacreligious, why are farmers more equal than others? If anyone else tried to cash in on pork-barrel subsidies this blatantly, they'd get ripped apart for it. But let it be corn farmers, who have a near-sacrosanct place in the pantheon of images of Americana, and they get a free pass, even when, as we've seen, it hurts other farmers.

It's about time we stopped worshipping an entity in the family farm that scarcely exists anymore (which we ought to consider technological progress, not a tragedy) and stopped falling for the bait-and-switch by big agricultural companies like Archer-Daniels-Midland who scarf up the ethanol subsidies as corporate welfare, then shovel a whole bunch of it back into congressional campaign donations and more lobbying. If ethanol can truly work as a substitute for gasoline and can be profitable, it will get produced by the free market without any government involvement. And as we've also seen, government is far more likely to massively screw things up by the perverted incentives it creates than to help when it gets involved.

Finally, if we want to get the farmers out of the government spending trough, we need to reform how the parties select their presidential candidates. So long as Iowa and all its farmers play such a critical role with its first-in-the-nation caucuses, we will never, ever get politicians to stop bribing Big Corn silly for the sake of obtaining caucus votes. Neither our electoral processes nor our energy policy should be held hostage by a bunch of subsidy-addicted corn whores voting every fourth January.

Oh, and one last thing: If the United States is to generate as many billions of gallons of ethanol as Washington would force upon us, we'll have to convert every last arable acre in the nation to corn production for fuel. Which means you can forget about food merely being higher priced. There wouldn't be any food left at all. Apparently, Congress and the farm lobby (and the environmental lobby, too) are so busy engaging in their political circle jerk, they can't even stop and think about the damage they're stupidly inflicting upon us all.

Click here to talk to our writers and editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.

To e-mail feedback about this column, click here. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it.

This is Column # DKK066. Request permission to publish here.