Hamilton was wrong in his prediction as to what men would do, but quite right in foreseeing the consequences of their foolhardiness. Federal intervention in agriculture has, indeed, proved “troublesome.” Disregard of the Constitution in this field has brought about the inevitable loss of personal freedom; and it has created economic chaos. Unmanageable surpluses, an immense tax burden, high consumer prices, vexatious controls⁠—I doubt if the folly of ignoring the principle of limited government has ever been more convincingly demonstrated.

We have blundered on so grand a scale that even our critical faculties seem to have been damaged in the process. No man who is familiar with the subject will deny that the policy of price supports and production controls has been a colossal failure. Yet, today, some of our best minds have no better solution to the problem than to raise the supports and increase the controls!

The teaching of the Constitution on this matter is perfectly clear. No power over agriculture was given to any branch of the national government. The sponsors of the first Agriculture Adjustment Act, passed in 1933, tried to justify the law under the so-called general welfare clause of the Constitution. The Supreme Court promptly struck down that legislation on the grounds that the phrase, “general welfare,” was simply a qualification of the taxing power and did not give Congress the power to control anything. “The regulation (of agricultural production),” the Court said in United States v. Butler (1936) “is not in fact voluntary. The farmer, of course, may refuse to comply [a privilege not given him under present legislation], but the price of such refusal is loss of benefits⁠ ⁠… the power to confer or withhold unlimited benefits is the power to coerce or destroy⁠ ⁠…”

The New Deal Congress replied by enacting substantially identical legislation, the second A.A.A., and now sought to justify the program as a “regulation of interstate commerce.” This was a transparent evasion of the Butler case; but the Supreme Court, which by this time was under heavy political fire for having thwarted the “Roosevelt Revolution,” made one of its celebrated about-faces and upheld the new act. The federal government has usurped many powers under the guise of “regulating commerce,” but this instance of distorting the plain meaning of the Constitution’s language is perhaps the most flagrant on record.

In the case that upheld the second A.A.A., Wickard v. Filburn, (1942), a farmer had been fined for planting 23 acres of wheat, instead of the eleven acres the government had allotted him⁠—notwithstanding that the “excess” wheat had been consumed on his own farm. Now how in the world, the farmer wanted to know, can it be said that the wheat I feed my own stock is in interstate commerce? That’s easy, the Court said. If you had not used your own wheat for feed, you might have bought feed from someone else, and that purchase might have affected the price of wheat that was transported in interstate commerce! By this bizarre reasoning the Court made the commerce clause as wide as the world and nullified the Constitution’s clear reservation to the States of jurisdiction over agriculture.

The tragedy, of course, is that the federal government’s unconstitutional intrusion into Agriculture has not brought us any closer to a solution of the “farm problem.” The problem, when federal intervention began, was declining farm incomes. Today, many farm incomes are still low. But now we have additional problems⁠—production controls that restrict freedom, high consumer prices, huge crop surpluses and a gigantic tax bill that is running close to six billion dollars a year. No matter what variant of the price support-production control approach we adopt, the solution to these problems continues to elude us.

The reason government intervention has created more problems than it has solved is quite simple. Farm production, like any other production is best controlled by the natural operation of the free market. If the nation’s farmers are permitted to sell their produce freely, at price consumers are willing to pay, they will, under the law of supply and demand, end up producing roughly what can be consumed in national and world markets. And if farmers, in general, find they are not getting high enough prices for their produce, some of them will move into other kinds of economic activity. The result will be reduced agricultural production and higher incomes for those who remain on the farms. If, however, the government interferes with this natural economic process, and pegs prices higher than the consumer is willing to pay, the result will be, in Hamilton’s phrase, “troublesome.” The nation will pay exorbitant prices for work that is not needed and for produce that cannot be consumed.

In recent years, the government has sought to alleviate the problem of overproduction by the soil bank and acreage retirement programs. Actually, these programs are simply a modern version of the hog-killing and potato-burning schemes promoted by Henry Wallace during the New Deal. And they have been no more successful in reducing surpluses than their predecessors. But there is also a positive evil in these programs: in effect, they reward people for not producing. For a nation that is expressing great concern over its “economic growth,” I cannot conceive of a more absurd and self-defeating policy than one which subsidizes non-production.

The problem of surpluses will not be solved until we recognize that technological progress and other factors have made it possible for the needs of America, and those of accessible world markets, to be satisfied by a far fewer number of farmers than now till the soil. I cannot believe that any serious student of the farm problems fails to appreciate this fact. What has been lacking is not an understanding of a problem that is really quite impossible not to understand, but the political courage to do something about it.

Doing something about it means⁠—and there can be no equivocation here⁠—prompt and final termination of the farm subsidy program. The only way to persuade farmers to enter other fields of endeavor is to stop paying inefficient farmers for produce that cannot be sold at free market prices. Is this a cruel solution? Is it heartless to permit the natural laws of economics to determine how many farmers there shall be in the same way that those laws determine how many bankers, or druggists, or watchmakers there shall be? It was never considered so before the subsidy program began. Let us remember that the movement from the farm to other fields of endeavor has been proceeding in this country since its beginning⁠—and with good effects, not ill.

I cannot believe that this course will lose politicians as many votes as some of them seem to fear. Most farmers want to stand on their own feet. They are prepared to take their chances in the free market. They have a more intimate knowledge than most of us of the consequences of unlimited government power, and so, it would seem, a greater interest than most in returning agriculture to freedom and economic sanity.