A Chicken In Every Pot, or, How Tyson Saves The World

Abel's Diner, in Garden Ridge, a suburb just up I-35 from San Antonio, is a bustling place at lunch time. It's good enough to be full throughout the middle of the day, even though it's hard to get to (you have to go a couple of miles past it on the freeway, then double back on the access road almost all the way); and good enough to draw me in, all the way from 281 and Thousand Oaks, about 15 miles away.

I was sitting there with my friend Rick, and overheard the waitress ask the man at the next table whether he wanted white or dark meat for his fried chicken. That reminded me of a report I'd heard on the radio, maybe two years ago, about how dark meat commands a premium price in Asia, the way white meat does here. And that got me to thinking about starving people in Africa.

The difficulty of life in sub-Saharan Africa has been a recurring theme in my head ever since I got a glimpse of it for myself, a year or two ago. Poverty, hunger, corruption and marauding are the Four Horsemen of their particular apocalypse, and all the mealy-mouthed good intentions of the West (and now, the East) for the past hundred years have done little to stanch the flow of misery. Prosperity, where it exists at all, seems limited to exclusive elites -- the white farmers in the Union of South Africa and Rhodesia, when those entities existed; corrupt politicians and their cronies; bureaucrats who feed on the crumbs that fall from the table of the powerful; warlords and their minions; and a few businessmen who have insinuated themselves between, on the one hand, the wealthy foreign companies who want to appear magnanimous to their home audiences, and, on the other, said corrupt politicians and warlords.

And then for some reason I thought, What would happen if somebody plopped a gigantic chicken farm down in some poor spot in Africa?

There would, of course, be some construction jobs that came from the project, but the benefits of that would be brief, and most of the benefits would likely be siphoned off to the Corrupt. A giant chicken farm à la Tyson would provide some low-skill jobs locally, but that wouldn't have a major impact. Management would probably be foreigners, at least at first, but gradually locals would acquire the skills needed for such an operation. And there would be distribution jobs to be done, getting the slaughtered, plucked, and cleaned birds to local markets; that, at least, would require a fairly large network of people, since markets in Africa are not like your HEB or Carrefour or Piggly-Wiggly; they're open-air, small-scale things like your great-grandmother went to in The Old Country: specialized, disparate, time-consuming. Since there is no electricity that can be relied on, shops can't keep quantities of goods beyond what they can sell in a day or two, and consumers can't buy more than a day or two's worth of groceries (if they can afford even that).

But imagine what would happen if suddenly economies of scale on a gigantic scale were to be applied to chicken-farming in Africa. Prices for chickens (and eggs) would drop, sometimes slowly, sometimes precipitately, as the Giant Chicken Farm entered local markets. Local farmers would be unable to compete, and while that may upset the relatively few who sell their birds, for most people it would simply mean that they would be able to buy chicken instead of raising it themselves. (Yes, the taste of the chicken would suffer just as it has done in this country, but starving people who must lay out relatively large portions of their meagre resources for protien would, I'm guessing, prefer bland-but-cheap chicken to the tasty-but-dear birds that now are available to those who can afford them; for most, it boils down to a choice between bland chicken or no chicken.) The pretty hens that are presently a sort of status symbol for the Man On the Street throughout the so-called Developing World would become less valuable, and people who now spend a great deal of precious time and money buying, raising and guarding those birds would be able to devote their attention to other things. They might start a business ... or at least form interest groups that would force governments across the continent (and elsewhere) to streamline the ridiculous rules, and remove the ridiculous obstacles that now require so much effort to start even the simplest business.

(We Americans don't know how good we've got it. You want to start a business? You call the Secretary of State and register the name, call the IRS for a tax number, open a bank account and get a telephone number, and you're in business. Maybe you need a license, if you're doing something particularly regulated, like serving food or cutting hair or trading stocks and shares, or practicing law; but generally speaking, if you want to sell cellphones or cosmetics or tourist souvenirs in this country, it takes you a day to start up. In the poor parts of the world, it takes you months.)

There would be difficulties to deal with, of course: there would be palms to cross as every government official at every level who could possibly exert any sort of pressure would expect a bribe; although the threat to move the project to a neighbouring district or country would go a long way in minimizing that.  There would be a need for reliable power, meaning the construction of a generating plant -- which in turn could provide power to the surrounding district, thereby raising the local standard of living and opening up the possibility of other power-hungry businesses in the area. There would be transportation issues, but the people I've observed over there are pretty resourceful about getting around over what passes for roads. And a boost in local prosperity would bring pressure to improve the roads, while the greater prosperity would also make some greater local resources available for that. (And I don't mean building superhighways with large earth-moving machinery; there is plenty of human labour that could use a series of good road construction project.)

I suspect that the operation would turn a profit within a year or two, and would recover its investment in the course of five or six years. I may be wrong: after all, I'm no economist. But this I believe: the people of sub-Saharan Africa would benefit far more from small local-effect investment projects like a chicken farm than they do from the large graft-inducing oil and mineral investments that are, basically, all their national governments seem to care about.

How to Control Executive Compensation

To return to a previous sore point:

I'm sorry to say that I think Mr Obama's "Pay Czar" is making a hash of a response to the controversy over executive compensation. He has come up with a complicated scheme that will reduce pay for a few overpaid and probably undeserving executives (after all, they were the ones who caused the whole economic meltdown, they and their ilk). The scheme will end up in court, and after a long and costly series of trials and appeals, it'll be voided by the Supremes. It will cost us all a lot of wasted time and money, and accomplish nothing.

The problem -- the real problem -- is not that a couple of hundred honchos in bailed-out companies have exorbitant pay packages. The real problem is that large-company executives in general have exorbitant pay packages, while the rank and file people are stagnating economically, causing the gap between the rich and the rest of us to grow wider and wider, which in turn undermines the working and middle classes, who are the guarantors of the success of our democratic system of government.

The stress point in the popular media appears to be that our constitutional system of limited government prevents the government from regulating executive compensation.

Oh, pooh. Congress is perfectly capable of regulating executive compensation, and of doing it in a way that's in keeping with our present concept of "limited" government.  And it can do it in a way that is manifestly fair, in that it treats everyone the same, regardless of how much bail-out money their companies get.

Executive compensation is deductible as a business expense; there are some minor and essentially meaningless limitations on that, but basically every dollar the company pays out to every employee, executive or otherwise, is a dollar it doesn't get taxed on.

So all the Congress has to do is limit the tax deduction for compensation. I'm pretty sure Congress doesn't want to discourage companies from paying all those millions of middle- and upper-middle-class managers and union workers who are the foundation of their constituencies; nor would I. But it's a simple matter to take a self-adjusting figure, like the poverty line or the national median income or the national average income, and change the tax law so that any compensation to any individual (in whatever form) that exceeds a stated percentage of the chosen self-adjusting figure -- in my mind, 250% of the national median income seems about right -- would not be deductible from the company's taxable income.

So AIG and Goldman, Sachs are still perfectly free to pay their worthless executives exorbitant figures for ruining the entire economy of the country; they just don't get the rest of us to pay for part of it, in the form of lower corporate taxes.

It's really that simple.

Those Crafty Europeans

The surprising gift of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama last week raises certain concerns about what our friends across the pond are up to. Since, as he modestly acknowledged in his response to the announcement, the Big O has done nothing yet to deserve the award, three possibilities come to mind to explain just what those Norsemen are up to.

First, there is the possibility that the award is meant as a slap at the previous administration. Personally, I think somebody should've slapped W in the face while he was in office, along about 2002, and woken him up to the vile and festering corruption of all the principles he purports to hold dear: freedom, equality, the rule of law, and so on. His administration, which began in an atmosphere of promise, of a refreshed sense of responsibility and decency, went, in eight years, from tragedy to embarrassment to disaster: political, diplomatic, fiscal, moral, and finally economic. Maybe his daddy should've taken him to one side and delivered a Gibbs-slap to the back of the head. Well, too late now. Thank God and George Washington.

The sort of inimical creeping corruption of the Bush years seems always to result whenever licentious greed or overweening pride dresses in Vestal robes. The doors to the temple are shut, for public consumption, while the corruptors enter through the privy, and foul deeds are done in the name of whatever Noble Principle seems most at risk at the time. In Bush's time, it was Security. The 9/11 attack was one of the few vile acts of that era for which W cannot be blamed; but his administration's excessive response to that attack distracted, and continues to distract, the American public from miners digging under the foundations of our liberties. When a scratching in the earth is heard, Public Safety is trotted out, shown round the village, and taken back to the castle.

The Europeans, I have to admit, were less hornswoggled during the W era than we Americans, myself included. Less threatened by the attack on the Twin Towers, they, rightly it turns out, were not as taken in by his administration's pose as Defenders of Liberty. And so now that he is gone, the gift of the prize to his successor, for no reason other than that he is not W, may be intended as a slap at Bush and his late, unlamented regime.

Possibly.

Second, it may be nothing more than a grand gesture intended to encourage the sort of traditional diplomacy Mr Obama seems to have initiated. Barely nine months after his inauguration, the diplomatic climate around the world seems to be recovering nicely from the frothiness generated by W's my-way-or-the-highway approach. Peace has not come, to be sure, but we seem now to be approaching a time when progress might be made by consensus. A Nobel Peace Prize seems a somewhat extravagant attaboy, but given the turmoil Bush caused among Europe's chattering class, one can see how it might be viewed as the least they can do.

Possibly.

The third possibility, and the one I put the most credence in, is that the Nobel committee just wants to book Obama to speak. Can't blame 'em for that; he's the best orator we've had in our rent-house on Pennsylvania Avenue since Jack and Jackie. Considering the calibre of people we've gone for in the dozen intervening elections, that's damning with faint praise, but you've got to admit: it's nice having a guy who can speak with an elegant cadence while using three-syllable words, and convey the impression that he actually knows what they mean.