230 Can We Still Afford a Separate Resources Policy? 



administrative and legislative, local or special interests may prevail; 

 in the great landmarks in forest, power, land, river development, 

 mines, the public interest has usually prevailed — but it has pre- 

 vailed in great measure by taking into account the vitality and the 

 social contribution of the private interests. 



This position, widely shared among political scientists, was de- 

 fensible until the radical shift in our power position became clear late 

 in 1957. Even before then many of our natural resource policies were 

 properly criticized. At a median cost of $504 per acre, the Missouri 

 Valley development program planned to irrigate an additional 5 mil- 

 lion acres, of which 10 per cent would produce sugar beets and thus 

 account for 31 per cent of the expected benefits cited to justify the 

 expenditure. Yet every additional pound of sugar beets so produced 

 would have to be protected by a quota and subsidized by the govern- 

 ment! ^ Such outlays are sometimes justified as redistributions of in- 

 come. In that event it would be useful to know who is benefitted. 

 Under the Agricultural Conservation Program, now in its twenty- 

 second year, I estimated a few years ago that 20 per cent of the farm- 

 ers were getting about 60 per cent of the payment. Under the price 

 support programs the USD A calculated in December of 1957 that 27 

 per cent of the farmers got 79 per cent of the benefits.^ None of these 

 concentrations of benefits would appear remotely to approach those 

 that arise from the depletion allowance in petroleum. Nevertheless, 

 only a few years ago we could seemingly afford it all. Our mobile, 

 expanding, fully employed economy encouraged the private pursuit of 

 opportunity and permitted a levelling-up in the general community, 

 so long as we could maintain a semi-detached state from the rest of 

 the world and hence consider our foremost problems to be essen- 

 tially domestic ones. 



2 Edward F. Renshaw, Toward Responsible Government (Chicago: Idyia 

 Press, 1957), pp. 12, 22, 24. The projected increase in domestic sugar beet 

 acreage would require an amendment to the Sugar Act considerably to increase 

 the U.S. share of the domestic sugar market. 



3 Charles M. Hardin, The Politics of Agriculture (Glencoe: The Free Press, 

 1952), p. 109. USDA 3647-57 (December 10, 1957). Edward F. Renshaw has 

 made a similar calculation using 1946 figures: that some 30 per cent of the 

 farms got 80 per cent of the price support benefits (forthcoming paper, "A 

 Note on Farm Price Support Programs," Department of Economics, University 

 of Chicago, 1958). 



