I had to admit he was on to something.

The local-foods movement, springing from a generally affluent, generally left-leaning, and disenchanted consumer base, has been so thoroughly identified with a “liberal” mantra that the movement is often derided by the right.  To be sure, much of the poetic allegiances, arbitrary “local” circumferences, and irrational fears of all things Monsanto grates on the nerves of those who pride themselves on reasoned decision-making.  Yet for those of us who see folly in centralized power, this movement has something to tell us.  It is reinventing how many of us eat — and how an increasing number of us produce — food.

Danger to the Individual

The litany of abuses by centralized power against the individual is long and predictable.  But centralization in agriculture, that hazy realm from which our food spontaneously appears, poses its own set of dangers to individual aspirations.  Now that fewer than 2 percent of the population is directly engaged in food production (down from 25 percent at the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt’s failed drive to “save the farmer”), the fact that agriculture has been massively consolidated is inescapable.  While this is not entirely a bad thing (obesity now trumps hunger in our collective top-ten list of concerns), it does present a troubling side.  When the vast majority of meat processing (87 percent) is done by just four companies, the system is top-heavy and fragile.  Coupled with the crony-capitalism of a powerful lobby, centralized agriculture makes youthful entry into agriculture difficult and financially reckless.  The local-foods movement offers an alternative to this agricultural-industrial complex, presenting producers with healthier profit potentials and reviving a more diffuse and independent agrarian production base.

In an address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in 1859, Abraham Lincoln stated that “no other human occupation opens so wide a field for the profitable and agreeable combination of labor with cultivated thought, as agriculture.”  The advent of highly mechanized industrial production systems has largely erased this intellectual and emotional bond that Jefferson and Lincoln relied on to create virtuous citizen-farmers.  But now, perhaps even as a result of this, a newfound appreciation for old patterns has sprung up.  Many alleged leftists have found that concepts of freedom and individuality resonate strongly if rooted in a land ethic and in local produce.  For them centralization in markets and among corporations is of more pressing concern than centralization of political power, and feeding their dollars into local agriculture is a palatable way to participate in a free market.  Ironically enough, while many so-called liberals express skepticism about laissez-faire economies, they are the first to indignantly resist intrusion by bureaucrats into local farmers’ markets.

Ideology Irrelevant

It has always struck me as exemplifying the beauty of a free market that I sweat and toil to serve a clientele to which in general I’m ideologically opposed.  I serve customers who, if their Obama bags, Che t-shirts, and “profit is poison” bumper stickers are to be taken seriously, are decidedly anti-capitalist.  And yet during the course of our clearly capitalistic transactions, we both find pleasure in the process and discover a newfound respect for each other.

The revival of local food and local markets is an interesting phenomenon.  While it still marches under the banner of the left, it blurs the political distinctions enough that the right ought to feel comfortable joining in.  They say politics makes for poor digestion. Who knew that what we digest makes for good politics?

During 1933, Roosevelt’s first year in office, GDP increased about 17 percent. What would have accounted for that?

Not FDR’s 1933 decision to seize privately owned gold and devalue the dollar from $20 per ounce of gold to $35. This increased the value of gold held by the U.S. Treasury and entitled it to print an additional $3 billion of greenbacks. The Thomas Amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) authorized the Treasury to print $3 billion more. Nonetheless, the total amount of currency held by the public didn’t increase until 1934. The Fed wasn’t very active during this period.

The most sweeping pieces of legislation passed in 1933—the climax of the Hundred Days—were the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, but both promoted contraction, not expansion. The NIRA authorized FDR to establish cartels fixing wages, prices, and output. The AAA aimed to reduce agricultural acreage.

Recovery Preceded Policy

It’s not clear how any of FDR’s 1933 policies could have accounted for a 17 percent increase in GDP, even if they promoted expansion, because they wouldn’t have had time to ripple through the economy. It seems more likely that FDR had the good fortune to come into office near the bottom of the Depression, and enough adjustments in wages, prices, and other factors had occurred that the economy was ready to recover. The economy had recovered from previous panics, crashes, and depressions without a big-government program. Undoubtedly FDR’s sunny personality and formidable communications skills helped give people confidence they could achieve a turnaround.

From 1933 to 1937 GDP increased about 60 percent. This was the biggest GDP expansion of the New Deal—and it occurred without federal spending and deficits that would qualify as Keynesian stimulus. Krugman wrote, “[T]he New Deal didn’t pursue Keynesian policies. . . . [F]iscal policy was only modestly expansionary.” Other economists, such as Price V. Fishback, agree that New Deal budget deficits probably didn’t contribute to recovery—Fishback calls FDR’s deficits “tiny.”

Since the NIRA and AAA promoted contraction, the Supreme Court gave the economy a boost in 1935 by striking them down. Ironically, FDR viewed the anti-New Deal justices as the “Four Horsemen of Reaction.”

Raising Labor Costs

It has often been said that the depression-within-a-depression of 1938 happened because FDR foolishly cut federal budget deficits, but that couldn’t have been the case since the dramatic 1933–1937 expansion occurred without meaningful deficit stimulus. Other factors help explain that depression, starting with the newly centralized Federal Reserve Board’s decision in July 1936 to increase minimum required bank reserves 50 percent and its decision in January 1937 to increase bank reserves another 33.3 percent. Suddenly, less money was available for lending, and interest rates went up—a double whammy for employers. The Social Security excise tax on payroll began to be collected in 1937, making it more expensive for employers to hire people. The undistributed profits tax became a big issue in 1937. The Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act in 1937, setting off the rapid unionization of mass-production industries, which led to an 11 percent increase in wage costs during that depression year—and a resulting surge in unemployment.

The problem with the New Deal wasn’t expansion. The problem was the persistence of high unemployment despite expansion. Many economists point to New Deal laws such as the NIRA, the Wagner Act, and the Social Security payroll tax (there weren’t yet any Social Security benefits), which made it more expensive for employers to hire people. Whenever anything becomes more expensive, there’s likely to be less demand for it.

Uncertain Tax Environment

In addition, the succession of New Deal tax increases—1933, 1934, 1935, and 1936—reduced private funds available for hiring. And the constant tax changes made it hard for investors to estimate their potential risks and returns, so they remained on the sidelines. Investors, like everybody else, need predictable rules. No wonder investment was at historic lows during the 1930s. Without investment it was very difficult to create new jobs.

When FDR came into office he had Congress and the nation at his feet. He was hailed as a conquering hero. With his rhetorical acumen and political genius, he might have begun by forming coalitions to undo his predecessor Herbert Hoover’s biggest disasters: the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff that throttled trade and the 1932 revenue act that doubled many taxes. Ending rather than embracing Hoover’s disasters would have been change that people could believe in! If, furthermore, FDR had avoided his own misguided policies, the expansion probably would have been more robust, and without the blunders of 1937, it might have lasted longer—and most important, it would have enabled the private sector to create millions more jobs.

Case in point is U.S. farm policy. The apt Armey Axiom here: “One bad government program creates the need for a worse one.” The U.S. Agriculture Department starts out by benevolently guaranteeing the farmer “client” ample price supports on his crops and thus a high return on his investment. The unsurprising upshot is overproduction or vast farm surpluses that become unmanageable, that cram government storage bins.

This leads to an even more bizarre consequence. The bureaucrats then pay farmers not to farm. Literally. And the amount of land taken out of production is prodigious. in a typical year, reports Representative Armey, Uncle Sam idles 60 million acres, an amount equal to the entire land area of Ohio, Indiana, and half of Illinois combined.

The above Armey Axiom also helps explain the bizarreness of America’s mass transit system. Over the last 25 years, Uncle Sam has pumped in more than $100 billion in mass transit subsidies, and now accounts for two-thirds of the operating cost of mass transit. With fewer skills than the average U.S. worker, the average transit worker is still paid 70 percent more. Yet ridership sinks and is lower today than in the 1960s. Nothing succeeds like a failed government program (a Peterson maxim).

Other targets of Armey Axioms include the Small Business Administration (with a 20 percent default rate on SBA loans), U.S. job training programs (the Job Corps program nips taxpayers for $30,000 per trainee), Rural Electrification Administration (its mission was over in the 1950s but it keeps on draining taxpayers), Legal Services Corporation (its tax-financed lawyers sue state and local governments on behalf of violent criminals evicted from public housing), and so forth.

More Armey Axioms: “The politics of greed always comes wrapped in the language of love.” “When you’re weaned from the milk of sacred cows, you’re bound to get heartburn.” “If you love peace more than freedom, you lose.” “Social responsibility is a euphemism for personal irresponsibility.” “There is nothing more arrogant than a self-righteous income redistributor.”

Freedom works, says Dick Armey. That’s his working title of this cutting yet beaming book. He holds America has only begun to grasp the meaning of great events in recent years—the revolution that sank Eurocommunism, for example, or the computer revolution, or the free-market revolution. These are but steps in the larger Freedom Revolution.

At the heart of this drama is Congressman Armey’s simple idea that people should be trusted to spend their own earnings and decide their own futures. The most just and compassionate societies, he says, are also the most free. What welcome heresy!

Dr. Peterson, an adjunct scholar at the Heritage Foundation, is Distinguished Lundy Professor Emeritus of Business Philosophy at Campbell University in North Carolina.

—Montaigne

In the current debate over federal farm policy, those who express concern at the government’s mountainous holdings of surplus agricultural products are accused of lacking sympathy with the plight of the farmer. When the full-employment bill was under consideration, its opponents were charged with desiring a “pool” of unemployed so that plenty of labor would be available at low wages. Similar accusations are heard in connection with housing, Social Security, “public” power, and many other politico-economic questions. Whenever it is proposed to exert governmental authority for the supposed economic benefit of one group or another, those who question the wisdom of such action tend to be branded as selfish, callous, and indifferent to the welfare of the beneficiary group.

Intentions and Results

Charges of this kind illustrate the tactical disadvantage suffered by those who look at economic issues from various angles instead of from only one. The forms of political intervention in economic life that add up to the “welfare state”—or, if carried to their logical extreme, to outright socialism—are directed at ends which may appear, and sometimes are, desirable in themselves. No one could quarrel with such objectives as continuous full employment, fair prices, adequate housing, and cheap power, if these ends could be defined clearly, attained successfully, and considered apart from the means by which they are sought. Those who oppose measures aimed at ends which are desirable prima facie have the burden of proof thrust upon them, a burden that is the more difficult to sustain because the objections, however grave, are usually less obvious than the ends themselves.

This seems to be why the worldwide drift toward authoritarianism and inflation is so difficult to combat. Authoritarianism and inflation are not conscious ends but means, or rather secondary results of means. The vast majority of people have no desire to live in political strait jackets or to see their currencies debased. They desire freedom and sound money. But they also desire the “social programs” upon which all modern governments have embarked, and in aiming at one set of goals they are unintentionally moving toward the other. The movement could be stopped in its tracks if the people could grasp the full political and economic implications of the words Montaigne wrote almost four hundred years ago: “It is common to see good intentions, if they are carried out without moderation, push men into very vicious results.” To most people, it appears, the “vicious results” are thus far less visible than the “good intentions.” As long as governments and popular majorities wear these economic blinders, as long as they have eyes only for the ends aimed at and not for the secondary results that actually follow, the gradual loss of both freedom and true security seems likely to continue.

The truth of Montaigne’s words, as applied to current affairs, rests upon a few easily observable facts. One is that every economic objective involves the sacrifice of one or more other possible objectives. Another and more important one is that every means adopted toward the desired end becomes the cause of many undesired results. Hence it is impossible to aim successfully at one end alone. Intelligent consideration of a concrete proposal must start not with the end but with the means, and it must include as many as possible of the ends which that means will tend to produce. It is not enough to ask whether the objective aimed at is desirable and whether the proposed means will attain that objective. It is necessary to inquire also whether the conscious objective is more important than those which must be sacrificed for it and whether it is important enough to justify the many undesired and perhaps undesirable results that will be entailed.

The Farm Program

The record abounds in illustrations of means that have been directed at certain ends and have produced quite different ones. For example, in the effort to insure “fair” prices for farm products, the United States government offered nonrecourse “loans” on so-called basic commodities at 90 per cent of parity, and on some other farm commodities at varying rates. To prevent overproduction, farmers were required to accept acreage restrictions and, under some conditions, marketing quotas in order to qualify for the loans.

The unintended result was that production of the price-fixed crops continued to increase despite the restrictions. It became worthwhile for farmers to cultivate land more intensively and increase yields per acre. Land withdrawn from price-fixed crops was used for others, and these in turn were overproduced. Prices fixed at levels above those prevailing abroad destroyed foreign markets for American farm products. Consumers at home were forced to pay artificially high prices for their foods and fibers, and domestic consumption was discouraged. Farm products from abroad were attracted here by the high prices. The development of competing commodities was stimulated. Even though the government gave away vast quantities of farm products, its holdings continued to grow until, in President Eisenhower’s words, “farmers, the intended beneficiaries of the support program, today find themselves in ever-growing danger from the mounting accumulations. Were it not for the government’s bulging stocks farmers would be getting far more for their products today.”

Housing and Labor

To protect tenants against high housing costs, governments have established rent controls. The unintended result is that new building and even normal maintenance have been discouraged, housing shortages have persisted, people have been forced to live in antiquated structures and, in some countries, comfortable living quarters have become almost unobtainable at any price.

To improve housing standards, the United States government has provided subsidies in the form of public housing projects and loan guarantees. The unintended result is that the construction industry has been overloaded. Building costs have risen to unprecedented heights. Housing intended for middle- and low-income families has been placed beyond the financial reach of such families. Consumers’ incomes have been diverted from other avenues of expenditures into housing. “Windfall” profits of builders have given rise to public scandals.

To improve wage-earners’ standards of living, the government has enacted minimum-wage laws and encouraged large-scale unionization of workers. As a result, marginal workers have been rendered unemployable. Costs of production have been rigidified and employers virtually forced to economize by abolishing jobs instead of reducing wage rates in slack periods. The strike has been used increasingly as a weapon against the general public and even against the government, rather than against the employer. Major strikes have, in fact, assumed the proportions of national emergencies, forcing the government into the position of virtual arbitrator between the contracting parties. The wage demands of powerful unions, by pushing prices and costs of living sharply upward, have become perhaps the most potent instrument of inflation in our economy. Meanwhile, the general level of real wages has continued to rise with productivity, as it always has done, irrespective of legislation and unionization.

“Welfare” and “Security”

In the endeavor to protect people against the hazards of unemployment, old age, sickness, and other personal misfortunes, governments all over the world have assumed the responsibility of maintaining high levels of business activity and of providing financial aid to individuals under certain conditions. The means by which these ends are sought are of three principal types: (1) direct control of various phases of economic life, such as prices, wages, hours of labor, and the like; (2) manipulation of the money supply and interest rates by central banks and governments; (3) direct outlays of public funds, either taxed or borrowed, not for the purposes of government but to provide “welfare” and “security” to individuals, as these terms are understood by governmental legislators and officials.

Both the intended and the unintended results vary with the degrees and types of control adopted and the economic positions of countries. Some nations still have serious unemployment problems. In most countries a condition of virtually full employment seems to exist at present, and in some an unmistakable boom is under way, with serious inflationary pressure. Such extraneous factors as wars, revolutions, armament programs, and American aid have played their parts in bringing about these conditions, in some countries more than others, so that generalizations are difficult. On the whole, the situation tends to strengthen rather than allay doubt as to whether governments can meet the “full-employment commitment” over an extended period.

As for the unintended results, two are beyond question: the suppression of economic freedom and the bias toward inflation. In some countries, freedom of enterprise and freedom of contract have all but disappeared. Almost everywhere, bureaucratic controls over the people’s economic lives have been widened and strengthened. There has been constant upward pressure on wages and prices. Persons dependent upon fixed incomes have been impoverished. Tax burdens have become heavier and governmental budgets more difficult to balance. Costs of production have been forced upward. The internal and external purchasing powers of currencies have drifted apart. International payments have been thrown out of equilibrium. To restore balance, governments have shackled foreign trade and foreign exchange with restrictions that have resisted all efforts to free them. Hope for currency convertibility has waned. Recurrent rumors of impending devaluation sweep across the world. Beneath the “pegged” exchange rates and the other regulated values is an all-pervading instability that makes a mockery of all devices for economic security.

The moral effects are less tangible but perhaps no less important. Under the influence of compulsory redistribution of wealth and income by state action, respect for the individual property rights that lie at the foundation of free institutions has weakened. Many independent, self-reliant citizens have found the lure of “something for nothing” too strong and have degenerated into pressure groups fighting for what they have been taught to regard as their share of the taxpayers’ money.

The Final Outcome

The evils, contradictions, and absurdities of the “welfare state” are, in the final analysis, the results of narrow and superficial economic thinking—thinking that concerns itself with a single, seemingly desirable end and not with the innumerable effects that flow from the means adopted toward that end. The proper aim of economic life is an over-all aim: the use of limited human and material resources in such a way as to serve most effectively the needs and desires of all the people. This aim tends to be achieved automatically in a regime of free markets where the people’s needs and desires can express themselves in price offers to which producers are forced by economic necessity to conform. When political authority, even with the best of intentions, interferes with this self-regulating flow of goods and services, it sets up chains of cause and effect which it can neither foresee nor control except by constantly widening its authority. The final outcome is a regimented society from which all objective and valid guides to human effort have vanished, along with human freedom. []

From The Guaranty Survey, March 1956, Albert C. Wilcox, Editor.

This article, under the title “The Wrong Track?” was first printed in The Prairie Farmer, February 19, 1955,

A County Agent fears that the farmers’ acceptance of subsidies will be used by government as proof that it has thereby acquired the right to control their lands

That is good. The program is far from perfect. Much of the compromise behind it was due to politics, and for a while there seemed to be more concern about who was to blame for the dip in farm prices than what should be done about it.

If the signs mean anything, much the same kind of a storm is brewing just ahead. Many of the arguments we will hear in the next few months will have a familiar ring.

Let’s take a quick look at some new ideas on the subject. As county agent, my work is with people, primarily farm people. The words are mine but the ideas are theirs.

I am concerned—and rightfully so, I think—not so much with the farm program itself as with its effect, its impact on the lives and livelihood of the people I work with.

That’s why I am disturbed. If anybody had told me 25 years ago that today’s farmer would need permission to sell wheat and the sheep men would be lined up for a check from the U. S. Treasury, I’d have said he was dreaming. Strange to say, the situation is apparently accepted by most of our people.

Although violently disagreeing with the principle involved, an ever-increasing segment of our people act as though they believed the government should guarantee success to everyone, especially to them.

This attitude is largely because our recent national prosperity was accompanied by an increasing amount of government control.

We’re confusing cause and effect. As a result, more and more people clamor for reservations on the gravy train.

Just yesterday I got a letter from a farm wife who asked, “Why isn’t the price of eggs supported? My husband sells corn and wheat on a government market.”

In my answer, I pointed out that she could probably do more to solve her egg-marketing problem than the government could. And finally, if all else fails, she didn’t have to stay in the egg business. Or if, as she says, “The margin is too wide between what we get and what the consumer pays,” then why doesn’t she get into the egg-handling business? It is still a free country, isn’t it?

I don’t think she liked my answer any more than a child likes to be told there is no Santa Claus. And for the same reason: Uncle Sam has been Santa to so many other people, why shouldn’t he be Santa to her?

Her letter raised this question, in effect: If the government is going to support prices on anything, shouldn’t it do so on everything?

Support arguments usually start a whole chain of fuzzy thinking. Talk to anyone who is for price supports and right away he says something like this: “Look at all the help labor and other groups get from Uncle Sam. Why shouldn’t the farmer get his cut?”

He admits that the government shouldn’t be helping anybody but then he turns right around and asks for help himself. Such reasoning is dangerous. Two wrongs do not make a right. If other groups are getting more than their share from the government, let’s lower the boom on them.

Another argument we heard during the recent election campaign was: “Farmers are going broke.” Sure they are. Free men will always go broke. Businessmen and farmers alike are going broke and for the same reason: The principle of competition and free enterprise are at work. The least efficient are losing out. Is that bad?

Would we make much progress if we reward the poor worker the same as the good? Should the government help either a poor farmer or barber, when most of his trouble is caused by his own lack of skill or by business factors within his control?

Good farmers are making money—real money, by following the best practices and doing a good job of management. They have enlarged on their opportunities and are using to the full their unequaled educational and service advantages.

The good farmer is also a good thinker. He knows that to help anyone who is not doing his ‘best is to destroy initiative and lower efficiency. Did the dairyman cull out the low-producing cow when he had a high guaranteed price?

So much for price supports. What about Agricultural Conservation Program (ACP) payments? Are they a curse or a cure? Are they “of great value in getting the farmer to adopt better methods”? Or do they merely keep him in the harness while he drags agriculture down toward the peasant level?

At best, these payments are poor public relations. Labor and other nonfarm groups look at the total cost to the taxpayer and yell loudly. They fail to realize that out of the dollars which the program costs only pennies ever get into the farmer’s pocket. Yet farmers are blamed for the whole bill.

The effect of the payments, if not their purpose, is to divert attention from the fact that the farm program has failed miserably to solve the basic ills of agriculture. ACP payments confuse the issue, muddy the water. They treat the symptom rather than the disease.

Still worse, they befuddle farmers and divide them until they no longer agree on what their trouble really is.

The worst feature is that it questions a farmer’s honesty or his sanity. The application forms contain a statement that the farmer would not carry out the listed conservation practices without federal aid. Let’s take a closer look at this.

Popular projects on the docket here in Illinois are the “initial” application of lime and rock phosphate. “Initial” means that these are new practices, that they have not been used before under the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation (ASC) program. Since they change the name every year or so (it used to be AAA, PMA, etc.), it is easy for a farmer to say he has never used lime before (under ASC), even though that particular field may have been limed twice or more under some previous program.

How can lime and phosphate be thought of as new practices, when we’ve known about them and the good results possible from their proper use, for so many years? Research has shown that, where they are needed, their use will return about 15 to 1 on the investment; that is, every dollar spent will return 15. Knowing this—and it is common knowledge among farmers who read or talk or listen to the radio—how can any farmer truthfully say he wouldn’t use lime or phosphate?

How can he sign the required statement without making himself out either a fool or a liar? Yes, those are two bad words. But the situation I described in using them is even worse. And it has government sanction.

What does it do to a farmer deep down inside—to have his arm twisted in such a way just to get a few dollars for something he knows darned well he would do anyway? What will he shut his eyes to next? Where will all this sort of thing end?

I am not a student of political science. But I believe that every ACP check a farmer endorses will some day be used against him as evidence that he agrees the government has an interest in his land and therefore a right to some control over its use. Thus every check becomes a milestone on the road to socialism—government ownership of land and productive wealth.

Step by step, we’re getting in deeper all the time, yet each succeeding step comes easier. Like the fish that can’t resist the fancy lure, the farmer is veritably hooking himself.

We’d like to ask: Will the hook always be baited? Or will the time come when the government will tell the farmer what to do? How long will it be before the sugar coating is replaced by a mailed fist?

Finally—let’s face it—government giveaway programs, if that’s what they are, will always help the nonfarmer more than the farmer simply because the farmer is outnumbered six to one at the polls. There are more nonfarmers than farmers, and we can recognize the political implications of that fact as we see the farmer squeezed today between rising costs and falling prices in a manipulated market.

The solution is not to further subsidize the farmer but to cut down on aid to the nonfarmer. It has been said—and I agree that the true effect of the farm program has been obscured by the false prosperity created by the war and the threat of war. Many people think otherwise; they believe that the recent good years enjoyed by agriculture were due to the farm program of those years.

Surely the latter is not true, for we are almost as far from a solution to the basic problems as ever. Like the squirrel in a cage, we’re on a treadmill, always in motion, but getting nowhere.

Do farmers honestly believe they should be paid by Uncle Sam for farming well? Or, that they should be guaranteed a measure of success enjoyed by no other member of our society? Won’t good farming pay for itself, if the farmer puts both hands to the plow, rather than having one hand outstretched toward Washington?

There is no doubt of the need for well-planned farm operations, including proper land use. Still, only about one farm out of ten is farmed with sound conservation measures in mind, simply because high price supports for crops like corn and wheat encourage a farmer to deplete his land. Such governmental intervention bribes farmers to engage in a kind of capital depletion which is known to be poor business practice.

Instead of trying to repair the old 1930 model—at best, a patchwork version of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA)—why not try a new kind of farm pro-gram? Why not restore some dignity and respect to agriculture, by letting the owner and manager of each farm business plan his own program of efficient production and wise land-use? If it is vital to this nation to have a continuing abundance of food and fiber, then it seems high time that we let the planning be done by individuals who have proven their desire and their capacity to make their own way in the highly competitive business of successful farming. []

Farmers Oppose High Price Supports

A questionnaire asking an opinion of the flexible price support law enacted by Congress in August, 1954—and also asking if the recipient “would prefer no price support law”—was submitted to 1,087 representative farmers in all parts of Indiana during September. Answers from 947, or 87 per cent, were received by the Indiana Farm Bureau Cooperative Association.

Of those answering, 36.3 per cent favored the flexible support law, which provides that the staple crops can be supported at 82.5 to 90 per cent of parity in 1955 and 75 to 90 per cent thereafter; 31.6 per cent opposed this law, indicating their preference for more rigid supports at higher levels. A similar questionnaire sent out by the co-op researchers in May, 1953, found 38.8 per cent favoring fixed, high supports, while 17.7 per cent stood for flexible supports ranging from 60 to 90 per cent of parity.

Thus it is evident that the number of farmers favoring the flexible principle more than doubled in fifteen months.

Further, the September questionnaire showed that 17.8 per cent of the farmers “would prefer no price supports” at all. When this number is added to those favoring flexible supports, it is clear that well over half the farmers of the Hoosier state stand for free or substantially free markets for their products. Less than a third want the government to prop their prices at high levels.

Oscar W. Cooley