RALEIGH – I revel in nostalgia. Turner Classic Movies is among my favorite channels. My science-fiction tastes extend no later than the 1960s. I like 30s-era pulp fiction. The other day, when an ailing Little Conqueror came to work with me, he passed the time not by watching videos but by listening to my 1950s Tarzan radio dramas. Don’t accuse me of reflexive modernity, whatever you do.

But nostalgia is a poor basis for setting government policy. Just because something was true, relevant, or successful in the past doesn’t necessarily make it so today. Sure, looking backward can identify some arrangements or conditions that ought never to have been abandoned – and that, if brought back, would benefit us today. Many communities used to be a lot safer. Families used to be a lot more stable, which was better for children. But look backward and you’ll also see ignorance, poverty, bigotry, waste, and oppression. We should judge policies or trends on the basis of their effects, not their age.

In economic policy, nostalgia is a particularly dangerous temptation – no more so when considering agriculture. For decades, government leaders and programs have sought to arrest the decline of family farms. For decades, they’ve failed. The recent news that North Carolina lost 1,000 farms in 2005, or more than 11 percent of all lost farms nationwide that year, has generated a new wave of agonizing and strategizing. State Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler says that a new federal agriculture bill might help, if farm groups can lobby effectively to insert bigger subsidies for young farmers and specialty crops.

I disagree. Encouraging farmers and agribusinesses to put additional resources into lobbying for special favors is hardly a recipe for long-term success or good government. We should be reducing the role of government in agriculture, not seeking to increase it. Farm subsidies make food and fiber more expensive, encourage the cultivation of environmentally sensitive land, and inevitably confer most of their benefits on large, politically active agribusinesses – all at the expense of the vast majority of Americans, including those engaged in farming.

Markets are unstable, even volatile. Industries and businesses change over time in response to experience, exploration, invention, and innovation. Try as you might, you can’t force the outcome of competitive markets to correspond to your idealized picture of how people should live and work. Agriculture remains a large sector of the North Carolina economy, even though employment is minuscule, because of massive gains in productivity. Show me a state or country with a large percentage of its citizens engaged in farming, and I’ll show you persistent, grinding poverty. If the goal is maximizing the availability of farm products at the lowest possible price, then the fact that agricultural productivity continues to surge is good news.

For many self-styled champions of the family farm, however, maximizing the availability of farm products at the lowest possible price is manifestly not the goal. Following the lead of Europeans, they seek to preserve farming as a tourist attraction, or as a means of frustrating evil suburbanization, or simply as a piece of nostalgia to remind North Carolinians of how their parents and grandparents used to live.

None of these goals can justify the costly taxes, subsidies, and regulations necessary to “save the family farm.” If enough folks would pay money for the opportunity to take their kids out to the country to see how their grandparents lived, that sounds like an excellent market opportunity for entrepreneurial family farmers willing to moonlight as historical re-enactors. And if would-be tourists wouldn’t pay for it, what’s the point?

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.