A tremendous failure (TimesSelect): Since I’ve already mentioned it, I unearthed Nicholas Kristof’s column about the failure of the development of the Great Plains, from September 2002. For those of you without TimesSelect access, I’m going to excerpt as much as I can and try to unearth the full text somewhere else for you. The lesson to take from this and from the story of Yubari, it seems to me, is that the government largesse that keeps Hokkaido, as well as the Great Plains, ticking is only an invitation for greater trouble later. It may be heartless, but someone has to say it: If you can innovate and make a future for yourself in small-town or rural Upper Midwest, go to it — but don’t ask me to pay for you to have the unsustainable life you have there now.

It’s time for us to acknowledge one of America’s greatest mistakes, a 140-year-old scheme that has failed at a cost of trillions of dollars, countless lives and immeasurable heartbreak: the settlement of the Great Plains.

The plains, which have overtaken places like Appalachia to become by far the poorest part of the country, represent a monumental failure in American history. To understand more I came here to Loup County, officially the poorest county in the United States, with a per capita income of $6,600 (New York County, or Manhattan, is the nation’s richest, at $90,900).

In fairness, Loup doesn’t look poor, and it’s so rich in warmth, community spirit and old-fashioned friendliness that it’s just about impossible for a stranger to pay for a meal here. The tiny school, the only one in the county, has student lockers with no locks; and outside, students’ cars are not only unlocked, but the keys are left in the ignition.

[…]

This vast region in the middle of America, more than five times the size of California, now meets the 19th-century definition of frontier, with six or fewer people per square mile. Instead of the frontier closing, as Frederick Jackson Turner declared a century ago, it is expanding, and we may look back on large-scale settlement of the Plains as a fluke, a temporary domination now receding again.

The aridity of the Great Plains is partly to blame for the failed land development here, but fault also lies in the vapidity of American farm programs — which President Bush and Congress are now expanding. It was, after all, a web of subsidies and government land promotion schemes that lured people to the Great Plains in the first place.

President Bush signed a $180 billion farm bill this year, with the backing of many Democrats as well as Republicans, after a gutless surrender to lobbyists for wealthy farmers. But the program will actually aggravate rural distress.

Subsidies do nothing to help hard-working ranchers here, because the money overwhelmingly goes to crop farmers rather than livestock owners. Worse, much of the money goes to the most prosperous families (47 percent of commodity payments go to farmers whose household income is more than $135,000), who use the cash to buy up more land. Subsidies thus accelerate the consolidation of farms that is already depopulating rural areas.

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