According to today's Wall Street Journal, now that the government tobacco subsidy is over, tobacco is back as a normal cash crop:

CARMI, Ill. -- Tobacco is back in the American farm belt.

Three years after the federal government stopped subsidizing it, the leafy crop is gaining new popularity among U.S. farmers. Cheaper U.S. tobacco has become competitive as an export, and China, Russia and Mexico, where cigarette sales continue to grow, are eager to buy. Since 2005, U.S. tobacco acreage has risen 20%. Fields are now filled with it in places like southern Illinois, which hasn't grown any substantial amounts since the end of World War I.

Mr. Barbre's profitable tobacco business adds a wrinkle to the debate over the farm bill Congress is preparing to take up. Many farmers say that without the system of subsidies for commodities like corn, cotton and soybeans, they'd be at risk of going under. But critics say the system fosters inefficiency, distorts international trade and supports mainly the wealthiest farmers. Now these critics can point to tobacco as evidence that subsidies are unnecessary.

No Subsidies

With tobacco, "we are finding that farming can be done without subsidies," says David Orden, a professor at Virginia Tech and an agricultural economist at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.

Oh my God!

That's an amazing discovery in itself. I always took it on faith that not only could nothing be grown without the federal government's help, but that nothing could not be grown unless the taxpayers paid people not to grow it.

You learn something every day.

Interestingly, there's more money to be made even after deregulation caused a drop in prices. That's because farmers once had to rent government quotas. With the quotas gone, there's no need:

Arnold O'Reilly, for one, figured it made sense to grow even more. Before the buyout, he says, the tobacco he grew on his Hardinsburg, Ky., farm was selling for about $1.98 a pound, but he paid up to 80 cents per pound to rent a quota, knocking down his effective price to as low as $1.18. These days, he says, his tobacco fetches about $1.60 a pound, and there's no quota payment taking a bite out of it.

"Before the buyout I couldn't expand," he says. As a result, "we weren't competitive on the world market." Today he is growing 120 acres, double the 60 acres he grew just before the buyout. He has invested more than $300,000 in new farming equipment, barns and land. "I'm unlimited in my opportunities," says Mr. O'Reilly, 42. "I have nobody that can hold me back now."

It wouldn't surprise me if the bureaucrats who like to control these things imagined that once their controls were lifted, the market would collapse, and there'd be no more tobacco grown. (A bit like imagining the Grand Canyon should "close" if no one is there to charge admission. Or "closing" beaches because of a lifeguard strike.)

In some quarters at least, ending the subsidies was seen as the correct moral approach, but one with dire consequences for farmers:

The government could better spend dollars intended to support tobacco growers by helping those farmers transition to growing other crops.

On the Other Hand...

Ending the program will not reduce the number of smokers or the number of smoking-related illnesses or deaths. Instead, it will be the nail in the coffin of the rural economy in many parts of the country.

The WSJ piece touches briefly on arguable morality:

Some local residents are unhappy that farmers are growing a crop used for a product that causes cancer. Mr. Vaughan's mother, Carol, says when her husband and son started growing tobacco, she resigned from the board of a local tobacco-free coalition that passed out literature about smoking. "To me it would have been a conflict of interest" to stay, says Mrs. Vaughan.

But Mr. Barbre says the opposition has quieted. Overall, he doesn't have any moral qualms growing tobacco, he says. "Somebody's going to grow it," he maintains. "People are smoking it."

But from an economic standpoint, this is good. And economics is morality, is it not? If we believe in a free market, then the more freedom there is in the marketplace, the better off everyone will be.

I'm not economist, but Arnold Kling is, and he remarked recently that government regulation creates disorder:

....when government tries to control supply, disorder emerges. Profit opportunities are created in crime and corruption. Compare the crime and mayhem in the market for drugs with that in the market for cigarettes. Or compare the disorder that resulted from alcohol Prohibition with the order that prevails today.

I don't smoke, but I noticed that cigarettes in New Jersey are over $6.50 a pack, which I believe extortionately penalizes schizophrenics, who are increasingly unable to afford the cigarettes they need as self-medication for their illness. If extortionate taxes on cigarettes represent a growing trend, I'm wondering at what point it will be considered disruptive. (After all, we are dealing with a legal product that millions of people consume.) Will there be a growing public demand that the taxes be lowered? Or might some lobbying group bewail the unfair double standard -- of zero regulation at one end, versus extortionate taxes at the other? I'm not sure what the economic laws are, but my common sense tells me that they can't keep raising the taxes at these extortionate rates without consequences.

I like the non-regulation of growers, and if I smoked, I'd seriously consider growing my own.

You can order high-quality tobacco seeds and growing guides here. In my area of Pennsylvania, Amish farmers grow high-quality tobacco, and while it probably involves more work than does home distillation, there are no laws restricting growing tobacco for personal consumption.

I just have this feeling, though, that somewhere there are people who are just itching to have the government close what they see as an "immoral" loophole.

Of course, in a free market, normal people would not grow their own, would they? It is only because of the intervention of forces of public "morality" that such an abnormal situation becomes attractive.

What about morality as a disruptive economic force?

Do moral disruptions ever "win"? Or do they just generate further cycles of disruption?