Stevenson’s Farm Claptrap

November 14, 1955

Developments of the last few weeks reveal once more that no matter how high or harmful a subsidy may be, it creates vested economic and political interests that demand not merely its continuance but its increase.

Even Secretary Benson, who has been urging moderation and sense, was forced by political clamor to announce that $85 million of the taxpayers’ money would be thrown into buying pork and lard in an effort to halt the decline in hog prices. True, hog prices are comparatively low. But it never occurs to those who are bawling for government subsidies to ask why hog prices are low, and what the consequences may be if the government boosts them. The truth is simply that hog prices have been falling because the demand for pork has been declining while the supply of pork has been increasing. Profitable hog prices will not be restored until the supply of hogs is brought into workable relationship with reduced demand. But any government support which falsifies prices will encourage hog raisers to continue in the same course that led to their existing troubles. It will prolong and eventually increase these troubles.

In the same way, it is the 90-per-cent-of-parity support for “basic commodities” that led to the huge crop surpluses which have exhausted storage capacity, misdirected farm production, forced our farm products out of world markets, led to our import quotas and export dumping schemes, and thrown a heavy burden on the city buyer of foodstuffs and on the taxpayers.

The appalling consequences of this policy should at last be clear even to a schoolboy. Yet that great statesman and intellectual, Adlai Stevenson, has joined the clamor for an immediate return to rigid farm prices at 90 percent of parity. His argument for this is incredibly naïve. “Our objective for agriculture,” he declared, “is equality with the other parts of our economy.” What does he mean by “equality”? Does he mean that everybody, whether farmer, factory worker, or film star, should have the same income as everybody else? He cannot mean anything like this—which shows how loosely he uses words.

He tries to explain what he does mean: “Our yardstick for measuring this equality is parity—a formula for fairness based on relating what a farmer gets for what he sells to what he must pay for what he buys. And 90 percent of what is fair is certainly not unfair or too high.” Here is a priceless specimen of begging the question. If parity is “fair,” then it certainly cannot be unfair. In fact, if parity is “fair,” only 90 percent of it must be unfair. Why is Stevenson so niggardly? Why not 100 percent parity for 100 percent fairness?

Of course what “parity” really means is that a certain past relationship between prices that existed from 1910 to 1914, or in the ten past years, is to be perpetually preserved, at the expense of the taxpayer and consumer, no matter how drastic the changes have been in supply and demand or in the conditions and costs of production. If Stevenson knows anything about this matter at all, he must know that as a result of trying to maintain 90 percent parity the government is now holding $7 billion in unsalable farm surpluses. It would take nearly a year to use up the American cotton already in storage. It would take at least two years to consume the record volume of American wheat already in storage. When such surpluses already exist, it is preposterous to support prices that encourage the farmer to grow still greater and more unmanageable surpluses.

What Stevenson is really saying is that he desperately wants the Democratic nomination; and that he thinks the farmers’ vote can be bought by this further bribe at the expense of the taxpayers and of city workers who must pay it through higher food bills. If Stevenson does not realize the economic consequences of what he is proposing, he is surely not fit for the high office to which he aspires. If he does realize these consequences, then we can only conclude that, like Harry Hopkins, he cynically thinks the American people are “too damn dumb to understand.”