Explanation

Just below, I posted a "tweet" from Matthew Yglesias which seems to suggests that he thinks that small farmers don't deserve a living wage.  I just went to his site and found a fuller context:

 [Mark Bittman argues that we need to b]egin subsidies to those who produce and sell actual food for direct consumption. Small farmers and their employees need to make living wages.

Now the context here is a larger program in which we’ve already ended corn and soybean subsidies, begun to tax unhealthy foods, and outlawed environmentally destructive CAFOs. So the hypothesis is that we’re aligning the incentives correctly—farmers are farming food, for people, not subsidies. Taxes encourage people to buy healthy food and regulations dissuade farmers from unsustainable practices. Under those circumstances, why on earth should the government add on extra subsidies for farms that are small?

 Now if you're the sort of feller who supports creative destruction because you can get a badly made tee-shirt for a few pennies off provided all the jobs are mechanized and shipped to China and two or three mega stores dominate the market  because economic efficiencies are the only way to think about social and political arrangements, and you believe in the closely related idea that the market functions in a natural way; well then, fine. There's no reason for people to step in and seize control of their future because the world works the way the world works and the present world is the best of all possible worlds and, what is more, not only is there no need to intervene but to do so violates all the laws of nature that created the nearly perfect world we currently inhabit.

And, of course, he wouldn't be a Neoliberal were he not to insist that the best way forward is for the small farmers to market themselves to the rich.

And of course if a smaller farm can produce a better product, that’s excellent for them and they should find a market niche on that basis. But there’s no more reason for public policy to put its thumb on the scale of smallness than to put its thumb on the scale in favor of corn. Personally, I like going to the farmer’s market when the weather’s nice and so do a lot of other people. In the more prosperous America of tomorrow, I bet even more people will enjoy paying a small premium for the premium wares available at such markets.

In closing he asks:

But what’s the case for smallness as such supposed to be?

Because organic farming is expensive, organic farms are a social good, and, consequently, worth paying for. On the other side of the ledger there's the dangers of mono-crop agriculture, mega hog farm run off, the chickens that taste like shit and are filled with crap, the beef that tastes like crap and is filled with shit, the vegetables that all taste like cucumbers, periodic outbreaks of food-borne illness because of the intermingling of shit and food, and so on. By supporting small scale sustainable agriculture we make the world a nicer place to live in for people who aren't so rich that they can be miffed when the co-op won't let them enlarge their already large living space.

It's not, in other words, a question of economic efficiency; it's a question of how you want to live and to what extent you think that the purpose humanity in a social situation is rather more elevated than the cost efficiencies associated with that great econ 101 concept of economies of scale; or, put another way, you think that the reason we do things is to make the world a more pleasant place.