The Other Side of The Subsidy

. . . Farmers have been forced to sow winter wheat this month in accordance with permission granted by the United States government. One, reading the official docu ment giving a certain farm owner in the Genesee Valley, for instance, permission to sow 13 acres of wheat on his 200 acre farm for the year 1950, cannot help but wonder .... When the farmer applies for a larger allotment he is informed .that he can have five minutes on a certain Tues .. day afternoon to present his case.... "Failure to appear at this hearing may be considered a waiver of your right in connection with such appeal." An insidious part of this system is that it makes use of local committees to harness the farmers in every county. The allotment is issued in the name of the local county ... committee, but in fact it is sent out by a bureaucrat in the Federal Building at the county seat. The original idea of having local committees do the hatchet work was bor[ 144] rowed from Russia. It works well and helps to silence opposition.

It is hardly lack of due process for the government to regulate that which it subsidizes. UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. Ill, p. 131, Oct. 1942 This court decision shocked many persons who be lieved that they could have both liberty and subsidies. But the government must of necessity control the spending of money collected from taxpayers. Avoiding control requires avoiding a subsidy, whether it be as a wheat payment or in any other form. A person cannot be both dependent and independent. [145 ] NO VACANCIES A DOLLAR a month will pay a wage-earner's rent in Paris. Our authority for this assertion is the Communist-domi nated Federation of Labor Unions, the CGT. In setting forth its demands for a minimum wage to insure a decent living, it produced a worker's budget where the expendi ture for rent was put at 316 francs. (In this analysis, all figures will be stated in dollars at the rough valuation of 300 francs to the dollar.) Against this figure one may set the estimate of the con servative Union of Family Associations. Thinking in terms of families, this source sets the expenditure on rent, pro viding adequate space, at a dollar and a half for a man and wife with a child and an infant; for a family of six the expenditure on rent should go up to a little less than two dollars.