REMARKS TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT CHANGE MEANING OF MESSAGE

In a joint appearance at the Scott County Farm Bureau last Thursday night (as reported in our Monday newspaper) the crowd was able to "size up" this area's Missouri State Senatorial candidates BETTY HEARNES and PETER KINDER.

The approximately 22 minute remarks from both candidates were hard to condense into a news article, but the event is to be replayed on Cape Cable Television Channel 13 this Thursday night at 9.

This is a good opportunity to hear what the two candidates determined they should discuss in their prepared remarks to the Farm Bureau.

I would like to call attention to one item that we reported which wasn't quite clear.

Hearnes noted in her remarks "someone has written `shrinkage of farmers ... is part of an absolutely healthy trend.'"

The audience was not aware that she was referring to a column written by Peter Kinder in the April 12, 1990 issue of this newspaper. She sourced this to our reporter AFTER the joint appearance and we thus identified this in our story.

Any time anyone uses a sentence from an editorial or column that ran in this newspaper out of context, we have been quick to review it in the past and will do so in the future.

Since Kinder elected to take a leave of absence from this newspaper and his four years of column writing on Aug. 9th ... and since the column is worth revisiting and noting the usage of one's paper trail, here's "the rest of the story" ... namely the farm portion of the Kinder column of 4/12/1990.

Rock singers & concerts--

Farm Aid ignores the facts

"I note that Willie Nelson, John Cougar Mellencamp, Jackson Browne and many others of the usual suspects spent the weekend in the Indianapolis Hoosier Dome singing for another "Farm Aid" concert. This was "Farm Aid IV". Or was it "Farm Aid IX"? Or XIII?

Aided by fawning, uncritical media coverage across the nation, these people usually manage to convey the impression that we would be better off with lots more farmers in our midst, and that we are all under a positive duty to subsidize the remaining ones.

Crucial facts get omitted by the "activist" types. Such as the fact that farm productivity has more than tripled since the late 1950s. Viewed in this sense, farmers can be seen as victims of their own productivity, which has been rising awesomely for many decades now.

Critics of this line of thinking will say that I am being tough on farmers. They are flatly wrong. Far from this being any sort of a reproach to farmers, it is the strongest possible compliment to them.

Perusing the St. Louis Business Journal recently, I came across the following arresting information. It was presented on the editorial page without comment:

"Numbers count:

"Number of farmers as a percentage of the population in the United States: 2 percent.

"Number of farmers as a percentage of the population in China: 80 percent."

Let's reflect on that data for a minute. Which society is more progressive? Which is freer? Which is richer? Which is more productive, whether on the farm, or in the larger non-farm economy? Which has more opportunity for mobility of all kinds, whether socially or economically, in education or the workplace or wherever?

In which country would you rather live?

In colonial America, and in the first years after our Founding Fathers gave us the American republic, upwards of 97 percent of Americans were farmers. Anybody want to go back?

Again, the point here is not to denigrate farmers or the absolutely vital role they play. It's just to point to facts so obvious that they can sometimes be obscured by know-it-all rock stars sentimentally longing for a past that is gone and can never return. Facts such as these:

The shrinkage of farmers, measured as a percentage of the American work force, while not without its unsettling dislocations, is part of an absolutely healthy trend. It is productivity-driven. it is not a recent development. It is literally centuries old. And as long as we remain a free society, it's as inevitable as the ebb and flow of ocean tides and the change of seasons.

It's really very simple. So simple that one would think even Willie Nelson and perhaps Elton John could grasp it. As powerful, productivity-enhancing research gets done, producing huge benefits in greater crop yields, as labor-saving devices of ever-increasing wonder and efficiency become affordable to more and more producers, farmers can produce more and more with less labor. This is the very essence, the sine qua non, of progress.

So the farm population shrinks as a percentage of an ever-expanding American work force, as more people leave the farm and enter other sectors of our economy. (Incidentally, almost without exception, the jobs to which these workers migrate pay more than the farm labor they left behind). Meanwhile, back on the farm, the team of oxen has been replaced (in some cases) by air-conditioned, eight-row combines, and with disease- and pest-resistant hybrids and wonderful herbicides unimagined a few short years ago. Except in countries as hopelessly backward as China, where oxen teams remain the rule.

And the results are clear. We all benefit from greater efficiencies and enhanced productivity, and the rising living standards that these alone permit.

Count me out of the next Farm Aid appeal. What did they ever do with all that money, anyway?"

Rerun of column by Peter Kinder 4/12/90

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College varsity football and basketball athletes graduate at nearly the same rate as other college students, but they take longer to do so, on average, and often get lower grades. Even so, a study from the Dept. of Education finds that, as adults, college athletes are more likely than other college graduates to be homeowners and less likely to be unemployed.

American Demographics

Magazine

The above says something for learning about competition adapting to success and failure, the praise and boos of the fans, etc. The real world is competitive!

Many fail in their goals because they're unwilling to compete, unwilling to risk, unwilling to suffer criticism, more willing to be a spectator in life who criticizes those "in the arena of battle".

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