Right, and the taxpayer and the farmer were the losers. That's what happens when the government gets into the act. It is a zero-sum game because the government does not add value. They just redistributes the wealth.
Frankly, when I read your other post, I wasn't sure if you were being sarcastic or not when you were talking about our skilled bureaucrats.
Managing an economy should not be done by a centrally planned authority like it was in the Soviet Union because, even if the managers are honest (they never are) no human could possibly do the accounting properly because of the myriad details and complexity. The Soviets came to realize that and they had hope that computers would save the day. But, as we see with climate models, a computer is no better than the data, formulas and assumptions given to it by programmers.
The best way is the free market.
Politicians don’t like big, contentious pocketbook issues. This year they have at least two, gas prices and food prices.
Farm programs began to be implemented in the 50’s , and given a huge boost in the 70’s, and their prime objective was to take the food issue off the political table.
Those programs were able to consistently count on something the Soviet Union didn’t have, farmers like my father. His desire and the desire of every American farmer even today is quite simple: grow as large and as high a quality crop as he could on whatever land he had available to him.
So the bureaucrats ‘problem’ was simple, determine how much of which crop was needed, and carefully release the reigns just enough to allow the farmer to produce that much of that crop. To enforce that upper limit, force those farmers who produced too much to compete on the open market to sell the excess (as determined by the government). Seldom has there been a viable market for that excess, and the farmers who went there too often went broke.
Up to this point, about 2004-06, the bureaucrats were very successful. Hate them or love them, you’ve got to admire their success in keeping food prices off the political pages. AND the politicians got to denigrate the farmer whenever they were in the city, because it was “The FARM Program”, and it wasn’t named “The Cheap Food for Consumers Program”.
Until ethanol. Suddenly, there is a viable alternative to the government structured crop price, there is the open market, the ‘behind the scenes’ ethanol subsidies not withstanding.
Given what is happening in the world, if it wasn’t ethanol, it would have been something else, as the weak dollar and the dramatically increased standard of living around the world has increased the demand for our crop production.
Overproduction has, and will continue to be, the nemesis stalking farmers, especially the American farmer. It will be interesting to see what happens when the next mountainous surplus occurs, and how the farmer will respond.