Rethinking farm policy
To the editor:
After reading the latest March 8 Farm News articles by Sen. (Charles) Grassley and Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig, the capitalist ploy called misdirection was dancing its clever jig. It would take a book to unravel all the nonsense spewed by the authors of those articles.
Naig unwittingly climbed on board with the America imperialist mindset called the Big Game entanglements. Capitalist warfare (economic war over the world’s resources) includes ginning up war fever against nations like China.
Naig should be more worried about land concentration into fewer hands in America, like Bill Gates who owns 240 thousand acres, and the loss of family farm livestock production. Recorded world history discloses that huge landed estates eventually lead to the decline of democracy, social unrest, revolution and sometimes despotic regimes. Naig should think about our historic Slavocracy and large plantation farming.
Sen. Grassley is six years older than me, so we both experienced living through the Roosevelt New Deal Farm Program and yet I have never heard him defend it. In a nut shell, The New Deal Farm Policy was “market discipline,” not “dog-eat-dog undisciplined yo-yo market chaos.” Logically speaking, 71 years of an undisciplined farm policy makes about as much sense as relying on nuclear weaponry to defend democracy. Both exhibit irrational behavior or just plain insanity.
The hard economic lesson in the New Deal program is and still remains a basic truth, all labor involved in the process of producing a commodity must be satisfied or rewarded (parity pricing). Since 1953, that is not the case today. We have and are short-changing our industrial might with underpriced grains at the farm gate and when we sell the commodity abroad. That is irrational, and Sen. Grassley has embraced those 71 years like a great big slice of apple pie.
Naig needs to understand cheap commodities are part of the big-game strategist. Sell cheap, flood the international market, drive other nations into poverty, create economic chaos, stir up war fever, make nations depend upon international debt relief and have one huge bloated military budget that can’t pass an audit but also saps the life out of the American economy.
Yep, our 71-year farm policy has unwittingly encouraged the rise of economic and social despotism here and abroad.
Larry Ginter
Rhodes