Big beef: independent ranchers and animal rights activists don't agree about much, except that it's time to stop using federal tax dollars to support the meat lobby.

• Author: Mahanta, Siddhartha

Imagine if the federal government mandated that a portion of all federal gas taxes go directly to the oil industry's trade association, the American Petroleum Institute. Imagine further that API used this public money to finance ad campaigns encouraging people to drive more and turn up their thermostats, all while lobbying to discredit oil industry critics--from environmentalists to those calling for better safety regulations or alternative energy sources.

That's a deal not even Exxon could pull off, yet the nation's largest meat-packers now enjoy something quite like it. Today, when you buy a Big Mac or a T-bone, a portion of the cost is a tax on beef, the proceeds from which the government hands over to a private trade group called the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. The NCBA in turn uses this public money to buy ads encouraging you to eat more beef, while also lobbying to derail animal rights and other agricultural reform activists, defeat meat labeling requirements, and defend the ongoing consolidation of the industry.

Like most things that go awry in Washington, this one started out with arguably good intentions. The story begins in the 1980s, a time when the plight of family farmers and ranchers inspired the likes of Willie Nelson and Neil Young to put on benefit concerts and launch the Farm Aid movement. Another, more enduring response to the farm crisis of the 1980s was Congress's decision to create what's known today as the beef "check-off" program.

The idea was to help struggling ranchers by creating a program to pool their money and use it to promote demand for beef. Under a bill passed in 1985, cattle producers were required to pay $1 per head to one of forty-five "qualified state beef councils." These councils in turn contributed to a national program supervised by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) dedicated to promoting the beef industry.

Older readers may recall the first major result of this legislation, which was a $42 million, seventeen-month advertising campaign launched in 1993 featuring Hollywood screen legend Robert Mitchum, who proclaimed in his gravelly voice, "Beef. It's What for Dinner." Over the years, similar federal programs have come to exist for other food groups, from avocados to popcorn, and have produced such memorable marketing slogans as "Milk: It Does a Body Good," and "Pork. The Other White Meat."

All along some have questioned whether it made sense for government to sponsor such programs. There's the libertarian objection to government imposing taxes generally and otherwise trying to change market outcomes. Meanwhile, medical authorities have been warning for decades that Americans eat too much meat for their own good (to say nothing of popcorn). Mainstream economists point to the inefficiency of using tax dollars to promote competing food groups: when people eat more beef they eat less pork and vice versa, for example.

But at least in its early days, the checkoff program for beef arguably served the interest of small-scale ranchers and in ways that were not directly at odds with the public interest. The $1-per-head tax on beef ensured that no rancher shirked the costs of promoting the industry, while control over how the money was spent was widely shared. Today, however, the program couldn't be more different than originally envisioned.

Nearly 99 percent of...