Shriveled grapes, shriveled liberty

In oral arguments Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear the government defend its kleptocratic behavior while administering an indefensible law. The Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937 is among the measures by which New Dealers tried and failed to regulate and mandate America back to prosperity. Seventy-eight years later, it is the government’s reason for stealing Marvin and Laura Horne’s raisins.
New Dealers had bushels of theories, including this: In an economic depression, prices fall, so a recovery will occur when government compels prices to stabilize above where a free market would put them. So Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “brains trust” produced “price stabilization” programs by which the government would fine-tune the supply of and demand for various commodities. In 1949, this regulatory itch was institutionalized in the Raisin Administrative Committee (RAC). Today it wants the Hornes to ante up about $700,000. They could instead have turned over more than 1 million pounds of raisins — at least four years of their production.


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Avenging the raisins

Since the grim days of the Great Depression, raisin farmers in California’s fabled San Joaquin Valley have raised their grapes under a food-regulatory regime that forces them to hand over a portion of their crop to the government, often without getting anything for it. The U.S. Supreme Court took a step, a big one, on Monday to give raisins something to dance about.

Like many New Deal programs, raisin rationing was instituted under the foolish belief that manipulating the market to raise the price of raisins would make more money for the growers and improve the valley’s economic health. Hence, the Raisin Administrative Committee, a cartel that dictates how much of the crop will be taken each year to reduce supply.

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Deja vu (depends on you)

From Roger Kimball's “Planned Economy or Planned Destruction?”
(Click image for enlarged view)

ROGER'S RULES, 3/26/2009 by Roger Kimball - "As we contemplate the obscene spectacle of economic profligacy emanating from Washington, it is worth reminding ourselves that we’ve been down this road before. That act of what Plato called anamnesis has two salutary effects: 1) it admonishes us about the dangers we face from the collectivists at the helm in Washington and 2) it gives us the confidence to resist, because we know from experience that our resistance, though arduous, can be successful.

Whence the reminders? Well, one can turn to the disabused literature on the Great Depression — to Amity Shlaes’s brilliant book The Forgotten Man, for example. One may also avail oneself of some past reflections on the subject–for example, this educational cartoon from the April 21, 1934 issue of The Chicago Tribune:" Read More......