I prefer to let market forces dictate prices and availability. When unimpeded by artificial constraints such as those which legislators often impose, the free market tends to find the quickest, least expensive, and most efficient way of creating, transporting, and selling a product. These factors operate in the intellectual, manufacturing and service industries as well as in the Agri-business sector.

A thriving economy depends upon an efficient energy and transportation infrastructure as well as upon unimpeded access to raw materials and markets. The Ag sector of the U.S. economy has surpassed all other civilizations in recorded history in the abundant production of high-quality, low-cost food, fiber and fuel. This feat is largely attributable to the Providential availability of rich soil, favorable weather, excellent cultivars, mechanization, cutting-edge technology, effective fertilizers and pesticides, an efficient transportation infrastructure, inexpensive energy, favorable trade agreements, aggressive inspection programs and appropriate "safety nets" such as crop insurance and limited price supports for producers during severe market slumps. Therefore, I intend to take reasonable and prudent steps to keep the components that can be controlled by humans readily available to the Agri-business community.

I prefer a "clean" bill on an issue rather than one that is laden with irrelevant earmarks or provisions that favor unrelated causes. For instance, H.R. 2419, the Food and Energy Security Act of 2008 (the 2008 Farm Bill), included a number of provisions that I opposed:

• Expansion of Davis-Bacon wage provisions to ethanol facilities that have financing packages guaranteed under federal loan guarantee programs. This expansion increases the cost of the projects and forces private companies to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in additional administrative costs.
• A $250 million earmark for land in Montana.
• An earmark that requires the USDA Forest Service to sell land to a ski resort.

Excessive taxes strangle business and the economy. In recent U.S. history, under the Kennedy, Reagan and G. W. Bush Administrations, we saw how dramatically tax cuts boosted the economy, the Gross National Product and even government revenue. The Federal government already collects plenty of money from its citizens and corporations. Rather than raise taxes, it simply needs to use more efficiently what it already collects, and Congress needs to hold the line on additional spending. Also, limits on estate taxes (popularly know as the "death tax") need to be made permanent so that survivors can afford to keep the family farm or business rather than be forced to sell it just to pay the taxes. My efforts to permanently eliminate the "death tax" were among the reasons that the Missouri Farm Bureau honored me with its "Friend of the Farmer" award in 2005.

Finally, I insist that bills accurately portray their costs. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. H.R. 2419 (the 2008 Farm Bill) did the following:

• The conference report violated approved "Pay-as-you-go" provisions by using outdated baseline data from March 2007 to score the budgetary impact of the bill.
• The conference report used various timing shifts and early phase-outs of spending provisions to hide $8.5 billion in costs.
• The true cost of the bill was $23 billion over the baseline rather than the $10 billion that was touted.