Across Europe this fall, dairy farmers took to the streets -- with the cows in tow -- to protest low milk prices. The farmers expressed their displeasure in Brussels by marching, shouting and spraying black-clad police in riot gear with milk straight from their beasts' unprofitable udders. In Luxembourg, they burned hay and threw eggs. After a month of protests across Europe, European Union Farm Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel agreed to distribute 280 million Euros ($417 million) to the dairy farmers last week, while fretting that the heifer hush money will "empty my pockets" of resources to help other farmers suffering from the downturn.

An almost identical tale unfolded on the other side of the pond last week as well, albeit without the Europeans' cow squirt guns. President Barack Obama signed a bill giving $350 million in emergency aid to U.S. dairy farmers. The Department of Agriculture also agreed to increase the price it pays for cheese and other dairy products in a longstanding indirect subsidy arrangement called the Dairy Price Support Program, which will be worth an additional $243 million to the industry.

What's going on here? When prices in other industries fall -- and the dairy industry is certainly not alone in its suffering this year -- workers don't usually hit the streets for a month of political activism, they hit the books to figure out where to tweak their business model. But there's something about milk that sends people running to government for help on both sides of the Atlantic. Last year, milk prices were about $19 for 100 pounds of milk (about 12 gallons). The combination of greater supply and lower demand has bumped the price down to $11 this year.

The U.S. and EU systems defy stereotypes about which side of the ocean favors regulation and which side lets markets run free. Since the Great Depression, U.S. dairy farmers have operated within a creaky old system where milk prices are set using an elaborate court-approved mechanism. The European Union has, by and large, been a major force for trade liberalization on the Continent. Moo juice and other goods flow across borders with ease. One of the explicit goals of the EU has been to reduce European farmers' reliance on subsidies and other government interventions.

The U.S. system is designed to insulate farmers from fluctuating levels of demand. While the prices ordinary consumers pay at the grocery store are more or less set on the open market, the prices dairymen receive for the milk they produce are supported by a variety of government subsidy programs. But no amount of bureaucracy, no matter how ancient and venerable, can insulate farmers from the market entirely.

The current economic crisis has reduced the demand for milk products -- mostly cheese -- and so the prices must fall. Because there is a motley crew of government officials in charge of determining what price dairy farmers will get for their output, the occasions for lobbying are endless. The big consumers of milk -- like cheese-makers, ice-cream-makers and Starbucks -- argue that high prices will put them out of business. Milk producers argue that low prices will put them out of business. And so the argument goes 'round and 'round. Neither side is completely satisfied when the price of milk finally curdles for big buyers and big sellers, and then they begin the cycle of bickering again the next month. Occasionally, when milk prices can be tweaked no more, the dairy farmers manage to squeeze a little extra cash out of Congress, as they did last week. It's a rough deal, and no one is satisfied when it's all over.

Meanwhile, the government in Europe has encouraged dairy farmers to be full players in an open market. It deals with milk-makers primarily though a combination of direct aid and international trade protections, not price setting. (Europe's system remains far from laissez faire, but the momentum over the last decades has been in that direction.) While this has been a boon for European consumers, who enjoy a larger variety of goods at lower prices, it has been tough on producers of commodities such as milk. One gallon of milk is essentially the same as any other so when there's lots of milk available, and demand is low, as it was in 2009, the price drops.

Thus the streets of Brussels run with milk and teem with angry farmers. And what do they really want? A U.S.-style system to be installed on a pan-European level. All of which is a demonstration on a global scale of a principle that every cow already knows: The grass is always greener on the other side.

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