Word: honestus
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...Honestus: Controls on farm production are necessary to protect the Government from the consequences of its own price-support programs. The Government supports wheat, cotton and several other major crops at prices so high that it is profitable to grow these crops and turn them over to the Government at the support price. If there were no production controls, then any farmer with enough capital and know-how could grow as much wheat or cotton as he could find land to plant it on, then unload the stuff on the Government. Price supports and controls inevitably go together in agriculture...
...Honestus: That's right. Despite very extensive controls, administered by thousands of Agriculture Department bureaucrats, farmers have dumped so much wheat, corn, cotton, cheese and other commodities on the Government that it costs the taxpayers more than a billion dollars a year just to keep the stuff in storage. Last year the Agriculture Department spent something like $7 billion, largely for price-support programs. That was more than twice the combined expenditures of the State, Justice, Interior, Commerce and Labor departments all put together...
...Honestus: Several factors help perpetuate the system. One is the inherent momentum of Government aid programs: once they get started, it is hard to stop them. The recipients of aid come to depend upon it and to regard it as an inalienable right; the bureaucrats who administer the programs acquire an interest in preserving and justifying their functions and powers. Another factor is sentimentality-a feeling that farm life fosters the old-fashioned virtues. Many defenders of the price-support system argue it is needed to preserve the family farm, that disappearance of the family farm would weaken the moral...
...Honestus: Well, since the middle 1930s the number of operating farms in the U.S. has declined from nearly 7,000,000 to fewer than 4,000,000, and the farm population has shrunk from 25% of the total population to less than 10%. But a technological revolution has taken place in U.S. agriculture-the combined effect of more and better machinery, more efficient fertilizers, deadlier pesticides and higher-yielding hybrid plant varieties. As a result, productivity-production per worker-has increased much faster on the farms than it has in the factories. Just in the past decade, production per farm...
...Honestus: No, not entirely. The overproduction is the combined result of the technological revolution and the Government's price-support programs. High price supports tend to bring on gluts because they divert land, capital and effort into production of the supported crops...