continued disrupting agriculture ever since. The trouble with farm
programs is not that they are malfunctioning in the late 1980s, but that
they have never worked well and Congress has never fixed them.
Almost all the mistakes of the past are still being repeated: only the
names of the secretaries of agriculture and of the farm-state con-
gressmen have changed.

"Prosperity through organized scarcity" is the goal of many U.S.
Department of Agriculture (USDA) farm programs. The USDA re-
warded farmers for not planting on 78 million acres of farmland in
1988--equivalent to the entire states of Indiana and Ohio and much of
Illinois. Government shut down some of the best American farmland
in an effort to drive up world wheat and corn prices. Supply con-
trols--paying farmers to plant less--are introduced only after poli-
ticians and bureaucrats have mismanaged price controls. The federal
government pays farmers not to grow seven of the four hundred crops
produced in America largely because Congress insists on paying farm-
ers more than those seven crops are worth. Government first artificial-
ly raises the price of the crop and then attempts to artificially reduce
crop production.

Each year, the USDA's marketing orders force farmers to abandon
or squander roughly 500 million lemons, 1 billion oranges, 100 million
pounds of raisins, 70 million pounds of almonds, and millions of
plums and nectarines. The USDA endows major fruit and nut coop-
eratives with the power to effectively outlaw competition and to force
farmers to let much of their crop rot or be fed to animals. To preserve
federal control of the lemon business, the USDA effectively bans new
technology that would boost fruit sales and benefit both growers and
consumers. The USDA assumes that farmers gain more from higher
prices than they lose from being forced to abandon much of their
harvest.

"Handouts in lieu of exports" is the core of farm policy. For sixty
years politicians have driven American farmers out of world markets
and onto the government dole. The federal government decided in the
1930s that American farmers could not compete with foreign farmers
and proceeded to close the borders to imports, undermine exports,
and drive up domestic farm prices. The leading export sector of the
U.S. economy was effectively confined to a government hospital be-
cause politicians said it could not survive on its own. But each time

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