I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

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E.C. PASOUR, JR.
AGAINST THE GRAIN IN
AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS
We all follow different paths in forming our views about political economy and the
appropriate role of the state. However, my personal odyssey also is different from others
Walter asked to contribute to this collection because of my economic specialty: agricultural
economics.
I was born and reared on a small farm in Gaston County, North Carolina, which
influenced my choice of college and major. I graduated with a degree in agricultural
education from North Carolina State College (as it was then named) in 1954. The only
economics course I took as an undergraduate was a highly descriptive one that had no
influence on my way of thinking, either about economic issues generally or the appropriate
role of the state.
Following a two-year stint of military service, I applied to graduate school at N.C.
State University and soon decided to specialize in agricultural economics. There I was
introduced to neoclassical economics and began to study this subject seriously. Fortunately,
I was in a department where several economics professors were products of the University
of Chicago and critical of government intervention in U.S. agriculture. While I obtained
a good foundation in microeconomics in my graduate, I gained no understanding of the
market as an entrepreneurial process.
Reared in a conservative environment and suspicious of big government, I was always
a critic of government farm programs. The positivist neoclassical economics in my master’s
program provided an efficiency justification for my views about government farm programs;
but I acquired no framework for thinking about the appropriate role of government in
agriculture—or, more generally, the role of the state in a free society. After working for a
couple of years as a research assistant in the Department of Agricultural Economics at N.C.
State, I enrolled in the Ph.D. program at Michigan State University, obtaining the Ph.D.
Degree in agricultural economics in 1963. At MSU the influence of the Chicago School
was much less pronounced and attitudes more favorable toward government intervention
in agriculture. In my MSU graduate work, I was surprised that professors in the Economics
Department were much more critical of farm programs than professors in the Department
of Agricultural Economics. The explanation became clear years later when I was exploring
the relationship between the source of financial support for academic research and freedom
of inquiry in agricultural economics. The funding arrangement for teaching and research
in the USDA—Land Grant University complex tends to make agricultural economists