Posted on 07/07/2014 11:47:30 AM PDT by grundle
"They want us to pay for our own raisins that we grew," says Raisin Valley Farms owner Marvin Horne. "We have to buy them back!"
This is but one absurdity that Marvin and his wife Laura have faced during their decade-long legal battle with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Every year, the Hornes plant seeds, tie vines, harvest fruit, and place grapes in paper trays to create sun-dried raisins. And every year, the federal government prevents them from bringing their full harvest to market.
It's called an agriculture marketing order. Depression-era regulations meant to stabilize crop prices endanger the livelihoods of small farmers across the country, but the raisin marketing order is particularly egregious. An elected board of bureaucrats known as the Raisin Administrative Committee decides what the proper yield should be in any given year in order to meet a previously decided-upon price. Once they can estimate the size of the year's harvest, they force every farmer to surrender a percentage of their crop...
The tipping point came in 2003, when farmers received zero dollars in return for the 47 percent of the crop they had surrendered.
Luckily for the Hornes, however, the Supreme Court took the case and ruled, in a 9-0 decision
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
Another 9-0!
I really hope this is a trend.
This is but one absurdity that Marvin and his wife Laura have faced during their decade-long legal battle with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
If their battle started in 2003, I don't think we can blame the policy on Obama.
I couldn’t understand why raisins had gotten so expensive lately. Now I do.
And yet liberals want MORE government.
This reminds of the Eddie Murphy movie Trading Places where the OJ futures were decided by few men
The article is from a year ago.
"Luckily"???
In a free country, justice is not a matter of "luck".
The quote from the article cuts off at a point that leads to a misleading conclusion. SCOTUS ruled 9-0, but not on the validity of the marketing order. Rather, the Court ruled that the farmers can challenge the USDA’s proposed fine in federal district court, and do not have to first pay the fine and then challenge it in the Court of Claims. The validity of the program is still being litigated.
In a free country, justice SHOULD NOT BE a matter of luck.
Leftist control freak bureaucrats LOVE vagueness in the law - it’s where they can derive POWER from arbitrary application of the law.
It goes bacc to the 9th Circus for a ruling on Constitutionality.
We need to rid ourselves of all Roosevelt’s communism
This was going on long before Obama came into office.
The extent to which justice seems increasingly to be a matter of luck illustrates the extent to which these United States no longer form a free country.
Your comment on leftist bureaucrats is spot on. Control freak bureaucrats make for a non-free country. In their pathological extreme, they make for a bureaucratic tyranny, of which the Third Reich and the USSR were examples.
“The validity of the program is still being litigated.”
If Congress was doing its job it would be eliminating these economy stifling outdated laws and defunding the agencies that administer them.
Every law passed should have a sunset provision forcing Congress to revisit it every 3-5 years.
There’s more of this than one cares to know.
This is part of the same socialist FDR set of controls put on just about everything during the depression. They dumped milk, killed and buried livestock, burned grain and destroyed produce to suit the price and supply controls the progressive economists and sometimes non-economists thought would fit their ideas of fairness. Non-compliance meant jail time for the producers and possible confiscation of the farm. FDR and his minions did more to deepen the depression than anybody imagines.
We hire people to work for us.
They in many cases are indemnified from any errors in judgment that they make while working for us.
We are the ones indemnifying our public servants.
When they do harm to us, it is up to us to pay ourselves for any damage that our servants have done.
And they get away scot free for their errors in judgment.
They are then free to abuse us as they please as long as we can't prove they acted maliciously.
They won 9-0
What happens if the USDA decides to ignore SCOTUS?
What’s troubling about all of this is that there should be MANY OTHER decisions that came in 5-4 that should have also been 9-0.
Obamacare comes to mind.
‘Constitutional lawyer/expert’, my ass...
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