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Show Farm Compulsion Threat By ELIOT JONES Projessor of Transportation and Public Utilities, Stanford University Our present agricultural policy has three principal features: (1) enormous enor-mous subsidies to farmers; (2) huge loans on stuple agricultural products; v and 13) far-reaching far-reaching control con-trol of farm operations, moving in the direction of a regimented agriculture. With respect to subsidies, the annual pay-ments pay-ments by the federal gov-ernment gov-ernment to farmers have increased enormously. enor-mously. In the boom year 1929 Congress ap- price falls to eight cents, he can keep the nine cents a pound he lias borrowed, bor-rowed, and the government keeps the cotton (worth only eight cents a pound). The inevitable result of this system, if the loan rate is set too high, is that the government is left "holding the sack"; and at the present time the government has large stocks of certain cer-tain agricultural products, the prices of which fell below the loan rate. To cut down its losses the government is then tempted to take measures to reduce the next year's crop, and thus to increase prices. This burdens consumers, con-sumers, restricts exports, and encourages encour-ages the use of substitutes, when available. The third, and worst, feature of our agricultural policy is its tendency to destroy farmer independence. The endeavor to regulate output leads to acreage allotments, production restraints, re-straints, and marketing quotas, and thus to bureaucratic regimentation. Said Secretary Wallace in 1934: "If we finally go all the way toward nationalism, na-tionalism, it may be necessary to have compulsory control of marketing, licensing li-censing of plowed land, and base and surplus quotas for every farmer for every product for each month in the year." In making these remarks the Secretary Sec-retary was warning the country against the danger of regimentation, but despite his clear recognition of the danger, his policies since that date have carried the country a long way in that direction. Moreover, unless un-less the farmers rebel in clear and unmistakable language we are going to move even farther in that direction. direc-tion. Though Secretary Wallace characterized char-acterized the 1J)38 agricultural act as "a new charter of economic freedom" for farmers, Wallace's Farmer, of which he is "editor on leave of absence," ab-sence," in its April 23 issue said that if the present voluntary AAA program pro-gram does not work with respect to corn, farmers will get something that will. "And that something judging by the experience of dairymen in the east and cotton farmers in the south will be ironclad compulsion imposed im-posed by the majority upon the minority," mi-nority," And what Is Ironclad compulsion but bureaucratic regimentation? propriated $500,000,000 as a revolving fund for the Federal Farm Board; and though the Board eventually lost this money, largely as the result of unsound loans, it made it last four years. During the early years of the present administration the farmers received as much annually from the Agricultural Adjustment Administration Administra-tion and other sources as they had received from the Federal Farm Board in four years. And during the present fiscal year, though farm income in-come is much above depression levels, lev-els, our agricultural policy will cost the Treasury about a billion dollars, which is more than the total yearly expenditures of the federal government govern-ment for all purposes in the prewar period. The relation between these huge expenditures and the problem of balancing the budget is obvious. The second principal feature of our agricultural policy is the loan system. The loans on staple agricultural products prod-ucts are intended to promote storage land to support prices, but they tend 5o bring large stocks of agricultural products into the hands of the government. gov-ernment. These loans, it should be realized, are not ordinary loans, but essentially sale contracts with permission per-mission to the seller to repurchase. Suppose the loan rate on cotton is nine cents a pound. If the price rises to ten cents, the farmer can pay the government nine cents a pound, and sell bis cotton at ten cents. If the |