A springtime essay from 1958 by Whittaker Chambers reminds of how the government has undermined free society through its overbearing agriculture policies.
A springtime essay from 1958 by Whittaker Chambers reminds of how the government has undermined free society through its overbearing agriculture policies.
‘Y et history, glancing back, may be struck by another paradox and wonder if, in America, it was not in the countryside that socialism first took firm root and stooled.” So wrote Whittaker Chambers in National Review on May 31, 1958.
The essay is called “Springhead to Springhead,” and it’s about agriculture. Since today is the first day of spring — the end of “winter’s long, cold enemy occupation,” in Chambers’s words — it seemed like a good time to reflect on this essay and America’s convoluted and coercive approach to agriculture.
Chambers, in his later life (he died in 1961), lived on a farm in Westminster, Md. He was by no means a large-scale industrial farmer, and neither were his neighbors. They resented the government intrusions onto their property.
“I suspect that the bureaucratic nose count in almost any farm county would fill you with wonder at how they manage without colliding,” Chambers wrote. “In part, they manage by the division of labor. While some . . . are helping you multiply yields — others . . . are exhorting you to decrease yields.”
These conflicting orders are part of the government’s program to stabilize commodity prices by destabilizing farmers. “The great tactic (it is almost a reflex) of the bureaucrat mind is to keep things unsettled, to keep you off balance, to make you feel unsure,” Chambers wrote. “I have never known on just what remote, snow-capped Olympus the wheat allotments were allotted.”
Maybe it’s not Olympus, but the Department of Agriculture manages the agriculture sector through the Commodity Credit Corporation, created in 1933 during the New Deal, when socialized agriculture was all the rage. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1933, 20 percent of the U.S. workforce was in agriculture, and the unemployment rate was 25 percent. New Deal planners saw agriculture as a jobs program. Today, 2 percent of the workforce is in agriculture, yet the CCC has become more powerful since 1933.
“The CCC mission was conceived mostly as one of commodity support, but over time it has expanded to include an increasingly broad array of programs, including export and commodity programs, resource conservation, disaster assistance, agricultural research, and bioenergy development,” according to the Congressional Research Service. It has sprawling authority to do just about anything the Department of Agriculture wants, and it can borrow up to $30 billion per year directly from the Treasury to do it.
The CCC has no staff of its own, instead operating as a sort of fictional organization through which the Department of Agriculture works and funding from the farm bill is disbursed. It was through the CCC that the Trump administration paid out billions in subsidies to U.S. farmers hurt by the administration’s trade war.
Treating farmers as wards of the state has been bipartisan. Chambers argued it is inevitable. He wrote of a small-scale revolt against the agricultural bureaucrats that some of his neighbors participated in. While he admired their spirit, he was forlorn about their chances of success. “These farmers were certainly mistaken; at least about what hour of history it is,” Chambers wrote. “The years of bureaucratic feeling-out were over. The day of submission-or-else had come.”
Chambers solved the problem by not planting wheat at all. But his neighbors felt that the government was violating a basic principle of a free society. “That principle is the inviolability of a man’s land from invasion even by the State, the right of a man to grow for his own use (unpenalized by the State) a harvest which his labor and skill wrings from the earth, and which could not otherwise exist.”
Unfortunately, the U.S. stopped abiding by that principle in 1942, when the Supreme Court decided in Wickard v. Filburn that even wheat grown on one person’s farm for use only within that farm was still subject to federal regulation. The Court applied the Constitution’s clause on interstate commerce to intrafarm non-commerce, throwing wide open the door through which the advance of the regulatory state has proceeded ever since.
Chambers thought government control of agriculture was inevitable also because of the “crisis of abundance.” He thought improved technology meant yields would always be so high as to force prices down so far that no farmer could make a living. “Controls of one kind or another are here to stay so long as science and technology are with us; or, until the ability of farmers to produce and the ability of the rest of us to consume their product is again in some rough balance, thus ending the problem.”
This has been the conventional wisdom across most of the developed world. Canada and the European Union pursue invasive agricultural policies similar to those of the U.S., creating all sorts of simmering conflicts between the governments of these allied countries. Canada and the U.S. constantly fight over dairy. Farmer revolts against regulations in the EU, which subsidizes its farmers at much higher levels than does the U.S., have attracted more attention in recent years, but removing the regulations and subsidies does not seem to be forthcoming.
Yet events since Chambers’s death should temper his prediction of inevitability.
On the legal front, the path to government coercion that was beaten through the farms in Wickard v. Filburn has partially been overturned by the conservative legal movement. In 1995, for the first time since the New Deal era, the Supreme Court in United States v. Lopez struck down a federal law for violating the commerce clause. It was the first in a series of cases under Chief Justice William Rehnquist that narrowed the federal government’s powers. Now the Court appears ready to eliminate or curtail Chevron deference, one of the other outgrowths of our screwed-up administrative-state jurisprudence that has expanded government’s control over everyday life.
And there is one brave exception in the developed world to the trend of increasing government control over agriculture: New Zealand. The Kiwis are more economically dependent on agriculture than the U.S. is, and they had similarly invasive agricultural policies until the mid 1980s. Under a Labour Party government, they essentially deregulated the entire sector, eliminating nearly all subsidies, price supports, and trade restrictions, over the protests of some farmers.
As of 2017, roughly the same number of people in New Zealand are employed in agriculture as before the reforms, and agriculture productivity has quadrupled. In a 2005 speech to the Cato Institute, Thomas Lambie, president of the Federated Farmers of New Zealand, said that after the reforms, farmers were in business “to serve the consumer, not the government.” This had the added knock-on effect of improving the environment, by encouraging farmers to farm the best crops for the land they own instead of the best crops for chasing subsidies.
New Zealand has been able to succeed with technology far better, and efficiency at much higher levels, than Chambers saw in 1958. While New Zealand’s policy is not the norm, it at least proves that greater government control of agriculture is not inevitable as technology progresses. And the U.S. could follow its lead.
The U.S. suffers many of the same problems that Lambie pointed out in pre-reform New Zealand. Cato Institute investigative journalist Paul Best talked to U.S. farmers for a feature published in January. He reported that one farmer, Gabe Brown, has realized that “running a farm to maximize subsidy revenue creates a pernicious cycle of monoculture cropping, harmful synthetic inputs, and time wasted in listless offices instead of experimenting through trial and error on his own land.”
Brown said he wasn’t worried about the government’s “safety net” disappearing. “My safety net is the resiliency built into my soil,” he said. “My safety net is the health of the operation. My safety net is the fact that I don’t rely on only one or two commodities to make my income. . . . That’s very liberating. It’s a good feeling.”
“In my heart, I believe that no resistance on principle, where freedom is the principle involved, is ever meaningless, or ever quite hopeless, even though history has fated it to fail,” Chambers wrote. “Freedom and hope — they are the heart of our strength, and what we truly have to offer mankind in the larger conflict with Communism that we are also locked in.”
The cynicism and fear that undergirds current U.S. agricultural policy takes away from the freedom and hope that this country is supposed to offer. The first day of the season when natural life returns is a good day to remember that it doesn’t have to be this way.