Oregon: Eating Our Seed Corn

The rapidity with which we have driven home the advantages of Mr. Smith's ideas about the invisible hand is at times striking.

Four score and twenty years ago, our direct contact with the earth was near to universal. We either had a farm, or knew the farmer. We either raised our meat, or knew the butcher. The miracle of eggs and butter weren't miracles at all. They were products raised at our local dairies.

Cows and bulls came together for a freshening. Bees bumbled lazily around the sky, bringing tastes of pollen to stamen. Cold years meant failure. Wet years risked failure. Hot years risked failure. Dry years risked failure.

But the one idea that was firmly ensconced in the mind of the man who provided you with meat, vegetables or eggs was, you don't eat your seed corn.

When learning to plant corn, I learned that you must place three corn seeds into your furrow. Three seeds, spaced about 18 inches apart and one to three of those seeds would germinate. Given changes in fertility of seed corn, I'm sure that the application rates have changed dramatically in the last 40 years. As your guaranteed germination rates go up, you can cut the cost of seeding by 66 percent, no?

I've come from a farm family. Farming in the United States for more than 250 years. That's not extraordinary. Most people who have families that have lived in this country for more than 100 years were involved in farming. Farming wasn't a hobby. It was a simple way to make sure that you had some nutritional basics in your larder over the winter months. Canning was a process that most women knew and practised.

But what you never did. What you never did, was eat or sell your seed corn.

You never sold your cow.

You could work out with your neighbor (who owned a bull) the price of freshening your heifer. But you didn't need a bull. You did need a cow.

You should already be able to see those things that you could do without and those you couldn't dispense with; sow, mare, doe, ewe. Or, as a cunning linguist might say, those of the feminine genitive.

You knew it was a bad year, when you had to sell your seed to pay the bills.

Oregon, my friends, is going into a bad year.

How do I know?

It has passed legislation to take the seed corn out of every business in Oregon. Fortunately for Oregonians, we have an initiative and referendum process that allows ordinary Oregonians to take bills passed by the Legislature and refer those bills to the People. This is the case with the upcoming election on Measures 66 and 67.

In a few weeks, Oregon voters are going to have a chance to tell the Legislature whether or not they want Oregon businesses to eat their seed corn.

Well, not actually consume their seed corn, themselves. Rather, to turn over their seed corn to the State, so the State can eat the seed corn.

And still, yet, and without thought, the State will insist that businesses increase yet again it's payment to the State, as a tribute for businesses' existence. Business won't even have the option of eating its own seed corn. Just to turn over their seed corn to the State, so that public employees can have it.

The State Legislature was told that this increase in taxes would really hurt Oregon's private sector. But they boldly told us that this was going to be the cost of doing business in such a pristine heaven like Oregon.

The economy continues to wobble. These tax increases will create a new exodus of investment from the state, and a new impetus driving greater unemployment.

Taking reserve cash from private businesses to support 30 percent wage increases for public employees...

And it won't be enough! Even if the voters choose to keep these destructive taxes, we're still going to have a biennium budget shortfall.

It isn't that Republicans haven't tried to moderate the growth of public employees wages and benefits. It's just that the Democrats have a Super Majority, and are being financed by the public employee unions.

There's no conflict of interest here. As long as you believe in eating your seed corn.