This weekend I saw the film Food, Inc., a treatment of modern monoculture, the fast food industry and factory farming. There were some parts that would make any libertarian cringe, and yet the movie did place a fair amount of blame on the state. Michael Pollan, food journalist and hero of the "slow food movement," was featured heavily, and he has always explained how farm subsidies are largely to blame for Big Ag, for the proliferation of soy and corn in almost everything we find in the modern American diet, and for distortions in the market from waves of illegal immigration from Mexico to the impoverishment of the third world.

Another statist intervention that gets some blame, although not with the libertarian analysis, concerns patents. Monsanto, the corporate food giant that has had its tentacles in the last three presidential administrations (including the current one), owns genes that can be found in 90% of America's soy. As wind inevitably blows the seeds from Monsanto crops to those owned by smaller farmers, the company has come to claim intellectual property rights over the land of those who want nothing to do with the company. It is forbidden for farmers to save seeds — instead, they become wards of this corporation. Even worse, some farmers have been sued for merely "encouraging" the violation of these patents.

The role of patents in modern food industry seems to be an understudied topic, and I would bet that with some exploration we would see how the fraud of intellectual property has messed up American farming as much as it has so many other areas of creative and industrial enterprise. In fact, I would bet that the vast majority of the grievances of today's anti-corporate farming movement, usually seen as part of the statist left, would be addressed simply by removing the state from subsidizing Big Agriculture, either through direct payouts and price supports, or through the indirect assistance of patent protection.

Incidentally, the movie blames Clarence Thomas, former Monsanto attorney, for his key role in a 2001 Supreme Court decision upholding plant patents, which opened the door to such tyrannical litigation and prosecution, as well as the increasing concentration of the American food industry into the hands of fewer and fewer businesses. This is just another reason I dissent from the view that Thomas is the best Supreme, and indeed regard him as one of the worst.