If you think a university education is expensive, you might want to blame the government trying to create voters for its party by giving away something for free - in the early 1990s, Congress decided that since a college education meant higher lifetime earnings, giving everyone a college education would mean everyone got rich.
Only colleges got rich - but a decade before that, the government wanted to give colleges more money too. By allowing them to patent technology from research created with government grants, it was postulated that college tuitions would remain low. That didn't happen, but they may spike even more if a farmer's case against Monsanto wins in the Supreme Court.
Now, Monsanto sucks, because in the modern world of progressive science academia, all corporate researchers are immediately unethical the moment they don't set their sights on an academic career - but they might be getting a bad rap on this one.
Contrary to popular opinion, Monsanto did not go around suing small farmers who used their seed, they just didn't want small farmers using them so they didn't sell to them. Why? GMO products work because of herd immunity and Monsanto wants to make sure the rules are obeyed. We don't want another DDT, where small farmers think more is better and so Rachel Carson gets famous writing an advocacy book claiming she knew someone who used DDT and got cancer and died a few months later.
But, in a rather suspicious move, a small farmer goes and buys some grain from a silo to plant a secondary crop and - well, he had no idea - some of the seed turned out to be Monsanto GMO stuff. Well, he didn't buy it from Monsanto, he says, and because it is for a second crop, he shouldn't have to pay for it anyway. Off to court we go.
If that sounds like a set-up to you, you are not alone. Naturally, the $29 billion organic Big Food industry and its alternative medicine and anti-vaccine fellow travelers are spinning it as a poor oppressed farmer standing up to an evil corporation.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentine/2013/02/19/farmers-deception-at-ce...
