This week's kerfuffle over USDA employee Shirley Sherrod reminded me of a WSJ piece from 1992 on the numer of farmers vs. the number of Agriculture Department employees. While the article, by David L. Littmann, makes a great point about USDA's bloat, it also contains a memorably silly chart. The chart, reproduced below, predicts the nonsensical situation in which there is a negative ratio of farmers to USDA bureaucrats. Of course, such a ratio could never exist because one cannot have a negative number of farmers.