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.
VI
Freedom for Labor
If I had to select the vote I regard as the most important of my Senate career it would be the one I cast on the Kennedy-Ervin “Labor Reform” Bill of 1959. The Senate passed the measure 90–1; the dissenting vote was mine. The measure had been advertised as a cure-all for the evils uncovered by the McClellan Committee investigation. I opposed it because I felt certain that legislation which pretended to respond to the popular demand for safeguards against union power, but actually did not do so, would preclude the possibility of meaningful legislation for some time to come.
That opinion was vindicated later on. The House of Representatives rejected Kennedy-Ervin, and substituted in its place a much better measure, the Landrum-Griffin bill. The ensuing conference between representatives of the two houses made only minor changes in the House version; I would guess that 90% of the original Landrum-Griffin bill survived in the conferees’ report. The Senate adopted the report with only two dissenting votes—proof to me that my initial protest had been wise.
But the protest still holds: though the Landrum-Griffin Bill was an improvement over the Kennedy measure, Congress has still to come to grips with the real evil in the Labor field. Graft and corruption are symptoms of the illness that besets the labor movement, not the cause of it. The cause is the enormous economic and political power now concentrated in the hands of union leaders.
Such power hurts the nation’s economy by forcing on employers contract terms that encourage inefficiency, lower production and high prices—all of which result in a lower standard of living for the American people.
It corrupts the nation’s political life by exerting undue influence on the selection of public officials.
It gravely compromises the freedom of millions of individual workers who are able to register a dissent against the practice of union leaders only at the risk of losing their jobs.
All of us have heard the charge that to thus criticize the power of Big Labor is to be anti-labor and anti-union. This is an argument that serves the interest of union leaders, but it does not usually fit the facts, and it certainly does not do justice to my views. I believe that unionism, kept within its proper and natural bounds, accomplishes a
