NEW DEAL: LATER STAGES 535 



name and fact. The measure provides for an all-too-perfect pattern for au- 

 thoritarian control of our agricultural population. 



The degree and scope of regulation and regimentation necessary to make 

 such a measure operative far exceeds anything yet proposed for a democracy 

 and to the Congress. The ultimate operations of the measure would involve 

 such sweeping bureaucratic control over all persons and agencies engaged in the 

 production, marketing, processing and distribution of agricultural commodities 

 as to require almost complete nullification of our traditional concept of democ- 

 racy. 



Simply establishing a price does not necessarily mean that buyers will be 

 readily available with adequate purchasing power to absorb the volume needed 

 for domestic consumption. Unfortunately, buyers cannot be coerced into buy- 

 ing when purchasing power is not adequate to meet the price demanded. 



In other words, price alone constitutes only half of the problem in buying and 

 selling transactions. 8570 blandly ignores this obviously fundamental fact. 



The measure fails to provide adequate and effective differentials as to the 

 many grades and varieties of each commodity included in its sweeping pro- 

 visions. The tendency to lump together with happy abandon all grades and va- 

 rieties of each commodity and establishing a similar price for each is a wholly 

 untenable position. 



Inasmuch as 8570 explicitly applies only to agricultural commodities actually 

 entering into the channels of interstate commerce, intrastate traffic in such 

 commodities remains outside the effective scope of the measure. 



The obviously natural result of such an oversight would be the erection of 

 forty-eight separate nations within the United States in so far as agricultural 

 products are concerned. The most casual perusal of the provisions of 8570 makes 

 this fact self-evident. 90 



In the spring of 1939 an alternative proposal, "the certificate payment 

 plan," supported by Myron Thatcher, described as "a balanced budget 

 type" of farm program, came into the limelight with the apparent blessings 

 of Henry Wallace. The virtue claimed for this proposal was that it com- 

 bined the processing-tax feature of the original A.A.A. with the market- 

 ing-quota system, which recently had been upheld by the United States 

 Supreme Court in a sweeping decision. It would furnish a continuous 

 source of revenue for parity payments, functioning on a pay-as-you-go 

 basis, and at the same time take the A.A.A. program out of the fire of 

 the growing economy drive in Congress. 



The plan had been worked out in some details with respect to wheat. 

 It had two principal features: it would call for the payment of a process- 



90. New Yor^ Times, April 27, 1939. 



