State of the Union, page 89 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt
<< Return to Title Details & Download90
nts; that the prices of our products of agriculture are too often dependent on speculation by non-farming groups; and that foreign nations, eager to become self-sustaining or ready to put virgin land under the plough are no longer buying our surpluses of cotton and wheat and lard and tobacco and fruit as they had before.
Since 1933 we have knowingly faced a choice of three remedies. First, to cut our cost of farm production below that of other nations—an obvious impossibility in many crops today unless we revert to human slavery or its equivalent.
Second, to make the government the guarantor of farm prices and the underwriter of excess farm production without limit-a course which would bankrupt the strongest government in the world in a decade.
Third, to place the primary responsibility directly on the farmers themselves, under the principle of majority rule, so that they may decide, with full knowledge of the facts of surpluses, scarcities, world markets and domestic needs, what the planting of each crop should be in order to maintain a reasonably adequate supply which will assure a minimum adequate price under the normal processes of the law of supply and demand.
That means adequacy of supply but not glut. It means adequate reserves against the day of drought. It is shameless misrepresentation to call this a policy of scarcity. It is in truth insurance before the fact, instead of government subsidy after the fact.
Any such plan for the control of excessive surpluses and the speculation they bring has two enemies. There are those well meaning theorists who harp on the inherent right of every free born American to do with his land what he wants-to cultivate it well—or badly; to conserve his timber by cutting only the annual increment thereof—or to strip it clean, let fire burn the slash, and erosion complete the ruin; to raise only one crop-and if that crop fails, to look for food and support from his neighbors or his government.
That, I assert is not an