Chip Taylor

Beef: The Generic Red Meat

The Supreme Court heard arguments in the "Beef: It's What's for Dinner" case.

The government went before the Supreme Court on Wednesday for the third time in recent years to defend an agricultural marketing program that requires producers to pay for advertising that not all of them want, and that some have challenged as compelled speech.

"Beef: It's What's for Dinner," an advertising campaign financed by a $1 assessment on every head of cattle sold, was at issue this time. A dissident group of ranchers who believe their own beef to be superior and who see no benefit in generic advertising won a ruling from a federal appeals court that the assessment, usually referred to as a checkoff, violated their rights under the First Amendment.

I posted on this back when the Court agreed to hear the case.

It's bad enough that the administration -- one that professes belief in free markets, I might add -- is defending a program that amounts to nothing more than the use of government coercion to compel participation in an advertising program. But the argument they are using to defend this program is laughable.

The government is defending the beef program as "government speech" that presents the government's message - albeit through the mouths of ranchers. Deputy Solicitor General Edwin S. Kneedler told the justices that the Agriculture Department must approve each advertisement and that "Congress itself prescribed the entire message" as part of the Beef Promotion and Research Act, the 1985 law that established the program.

"These are programs of government speech," Mr. Kneedler said. As such, he argued, the First Amendment does not apply; the amendment limits the government's power to interfere with private speech but does not limit what the government itself may say.

What a crock. The fact that Congress "prescribed the entire message" just goes to show that congressmen have aboslutely no clue about the proper scope of government activity.

It's just this sort of legislation that puts the lie to the notion that Congress (or legislatures in general) is concerned about the public interest, or public welfare, or whatever you want to call it. Government serves the interest of whoever can best organize to get the legislation that favors them. Sometimes we luck out and get a highway or a battleship or something tangible out of the process. Sometimes we just transfer money from one group of people to another and get little or nothing out of it. It's all private benefit.

In this case, "Big Beef" decided that a joint marketing program was needed for their industry. Of course, for an undifferentiated product like beef you need to force every producer to contribute to the program. If it's voluntary, every producer has an incentive to withhold contributions, hoping others will pay for it. Since they advertise generic "beef", even free-riders would benefit from the advertising.

So, beef producers have a collective action problem. There are private solutions. The set of them that are interested in advertising could band together, differentiate their product in some way (say by quality of feed), develop a trademarked (copyrighted?) logo that could be used only by program participants, and have their advertising program. Then other groups might band together differentiate their product in some other way and advertise the virtues of their brand. Eventually, we might have a full and robust differentiated market for beef, instead a generic beef marketing program.

But that, apparently, would require much more effort than to simply lobby the government to use "men with guns" to force recalcitrant cattlemen to submit to the beef collective.

Don't let windbags like Mr. Kneedler fool you. There's no public purpose in this program. It's a private marketing program. And not a particularly useful one at that; it provides no real information to consumers.

Government support of generic marketing programs limits the information available to consumers. These programs directly harm the cattlemen forced to support them, but, make no mistake, they harm us all.

UPDATE: Here's an AP story at Yahoo! news.