Visibly Orchestrated
Adam Smith died 235 years ago, and his invisible hand still has us by the short hairs.
The 18th-Century Scottish philosopher and economist predicted the evolution of the feudalism of his day into a market-driven rather than guild-determined economic order, what later came to be known as laissez-faire capitalism, something Smith considered a system of perfect liberty. He famously described how the desires and inhibitions of human nature would operate as an invisible hand guiding these free markets, thereby bringing about an orderly society.
More philosophy than economics, more religion than science, Smith’s invisible hand still has an iron grip after all these years. A mythology has grown around it. Laissez-faire — “allow to do” in French, letting things take their course without interference — is the central myth of modern capitalism. In truth, there’s an abundance of interference. Look no further than American agriculture to see how markets are politically manipulated to serve an industrial aristocracy.
A column of mine written back in 2023 spelled out the workings of the New Deal-era supply management system that served our country exceptionally well for generations, modulating the food supply to keep shelves stocked, food prices affordable and family farms operating profitably. In the name of free markets and with the promise to wean farmers from government subsidies, the U.S. abandoned effective supply management in favor of a system that drove agricultural industrialization by subsidizing overproduction. Ain’t much free about today’s markets, and food producers are every bit as addicted to federal assistance as ever, if not more so.
This policy shift had nothing to do with the stated aims, namely freer markets with less government involvement, but rather carried out the veiled agenda of a handful of global conglomerates. These ag conglomerates wanted fewer producers. They wanted remaining producers to be extremely large, highly industrialized and just as highly dependent on chemical fertilizers and pesticides and genetically modified seeds. They got their wish. With its move away from food supply management to subsidizing overproduction, our government put 4 million American farm families out of business.
Big agribusiness wanted monoculture, one crop grown year after year on the same fields, which meant ending diversified production and corresponding land-use practices like crop rotation and rotational grazing. They wanted this for two reasons. First, to make producers reliant on chemical inputs and lab-designed seeds. Second, to create a glut of corn and soybeans so they could cash in on lucrative markets by making new grain-based products like fuel and sweeteners. Their wish was our government’s command.
They also wanted overproduction so they could dump cheap domestic products on foreign markets, which they’ve done with reckless abandon, wrecking many a farm economy in smaller countries, commandeering food markets globally. The conglomerates threw their weight around on Capitol Hill, but otherwise tended to keep their intentions on the downlow. Except when they didn’t, as when ADM proclaimed itself “supermarket to the world.”
ADM is Archer Daniels Midland, a dominant player in corn and soybean processing with operations in more than 170 countries, a corporate empire so vast that when it paid the federal government a $100 million fine for price fixing in 1996, the penalty’s impact was hardly noticeable on its bottom line.
Cargill is the largest privately held company in the U.S., selling everything from animal feed to chocolate, but a big chunk of their revenue comes from trading grains and oilseeds.
Tyson Foods is America’s top meat processor, handling over 20% of all the chicken, beef and pork produced in the country, supplying meat to huge restaurant chains and grocery stores. As dominant as Tyson is, Smithfield Foods — started in the U.S. but now owned by a Chinese company — is the largest pig producer and pork processor in the world.
No discussion of industrialized agriculture is complete without mentioning the seed and chemical giants. Bayer, BASF, Corteva and Syngenta control over half of the global seeds market (Bayer alone accounts for nearly a quarter of it) and almost two-thirds of the pesticides market. Monsanto (now part of Bayer) basically invented genetically modified seeds. That means the company almost single-handedly determines which crop varieties grow in the U.S. and which ones don’t.
You can count on two hands the agribusiness titans that set the rules for farming, decide what’s profitable, dictate what gets researched in agricultural science.
A great many people in this country have been led to believe the corporate consolidation of American agriculture was inevitable, that it happened naturally, that family farmers simply couldn’t compete. A great many people have been misled. It didn’t happen naturally; it was politically engineered. The disappearance of 4 million American farms was a deliberate policy choice. If there’s anything natural about what happened, it’s that this kind of thing is a natural byproduct of political corruption.
It didn’t have to be this way. Politicians could have stood up to the agribusiness conglomerates and opted to stick with supply management instead of selling out family farmers and handing over the treasury keys to price-fixing, market-distorting predators.
It didn’t have to be this way, and you only need to cross our northern border to find proof. Family farms are dying in America, surviving if not thriving in Canada. Dairy herds in Canada remain both numerous and small, one-quarter the size of American herds. Getting bigger hasn’t proven to be a recipe for continued solvency. There was a 55% jump in the number of U.S. dairy farmers going bankrupt in the first quarter of 2025 while farm bankruptcies are so rare in Canada that the country doesn’t even bother tracking them as an economic indicator. American farmers are three and a half times more likely to die by suicide than the general U.S. population. Canadian farmers sleep better at night and are not taking their own lives.
It’s not that Canadian farmers are better competitors, better financial managers, better stewards of the land, better animal caretakers, it’s that family farmers in the U.S. have been wiped out not by poor decisions but by political maneuvers and market manipulation beyond their control.
What’s Canada got that we don’t have? A sound food supply management system, the wisdom to preserve it, and the good sense not to put too much stock in 18th-Century fairytales.