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The European Union spends roughly 55 billion euros every year teaching French farmers to grow food nobody asked for at prices nobody would pay. That is the Common Agricultural Policy. It eats about a third of the entire EU budget, and it has done so, in one form or another, since 1962. You are paying for it whether you eat baguettes or not.
Here is how the machine works. Brussels guarantees prices above the market, so farmers in Beauce and Picardy plant more wheat, sugar beet, and dairy than Europeans can consume. The surplus piles up. The infamous butter mountains and wine lakes of the 1980s were not jokes: they were warehouses full of products created by decree against the wishes of every actual buyer. So the EU dumps the excess abroad, subsidized again on the way out, undercutting farmers in Senegal, Ghana, and Kenya who never received a centime from Paris.
A farmer in Burkina Faso wakes up to find European tomato paste and frozen chicken selling cheaper in his own village market than what he can produce from his own soil. He cannot compete with a treasury. No one can. He abandons the land, moves to the city, and joins the queue for the next development grant funded by the same governments that wrecked his livelihood. The aid budget cleans up after the agriculture budget. Magnificent.
This is Bastiat's broken window with a passport. You see the tidy French countryside, the photogenic vineyards, the minister cutting a ribbon. You do not see the African farms that never expanded, the trade that never happened, the capital that fled to Lagos slums instead of staying productive on a farm. The seen subsidy buys votes in Rouen. The unseen cost lands on people who cannot vote in any European election and have no lobbyist in Brussels.
Free market economists have explained the principle for over a century: every price control creates a surplus or a shortage, and every subsidy transfers wealth from the unseen many to the organized few. The CAP executes this mechanism with a French accent and a humanitarian press release.
They call it solidarity, but to the Senegalese tomato grower, it is a competition he was forbidden to win.
If you're worried about ticks, put up an owl box.
The animal driving most Lyme disease in the eastern US is the white-footed mouse. Ticks that feed on them are far more likely to come away infected than ticks that feed on other animals. The bigger the local mouse population, the worse the next year's tick year.
A single barred owl pair raising chicks can take hundreds of rodents in a breeding season. Owls also don't carry Lyme. The bacterium can't survive their digestive tract, so an owl that eats an infected mouse is a dead end for the disease.
Researchers at the Cary Institute, the leading lab on Lyme ecology, have been explicit about this: "Landscapes that support predators have reduced Lyme disease risk."
One owl box on its own isn't going to fix a tick year. But a yard with owls, foxes, bobcats, and weasels in it has fewer mice, and a yard with fewer mice has fewer infected ticks.
If you have woods or fields nearby, a properly sized barn owl or screech owl box (different species, different ...
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