Farm Relief

Ten men have ten farms. Each raises pigs. Their common market is the village around which they all live. The pig prices they will get from the villagers depend on three things:

1) The villagers' hunger.

2) The number of pigs raised.

3) Who sells his pigs first.

To eliminate the last factor, the ten pig men cooperate. They agree on a pig-selling period. To protect themselves further from each other, they agree that, for each pig he sells, each pig man shall put a certain fee in a common fund. At the end of the pig-selling period, portions of this fund shall be advanced to any of the ten pig men who have had to sell their pigs, at home or in some other village, for less than what all agree upon that year's "fair price" for pigs. The pig men have thus equalized their prosperity.

The pig men might avoid paying in their equalization fees by getting some local philanthropist to set up a marketing fund for them. Then, in years when the ten pig men raised more pigs than could be sold profitably in their home village, those who had surplus pigs could borrow from the fund to pay for transporting their pigs to distant markets, or to buy feed for pigs kept penned until the home village was ready to buy more pigs. In case the pig surplus was so great that the pig men's borrowings exhausted the loan fund, the pig men could always fall back again on the equalization fee plan. To ensure honesty, perhaps the philanthropist had better administer the equalization fee as well as the loan fund. . . .

Last week the House passed the Senate's farm relief bill. Representative Haugen's name (Iowa) again joined Senator McNary's (Oregon) as the author of what, in principle, was voted down once and shelved once by the 68th Congress, voted down and then passed by the 69th Congress, and finally vetoed last year by President Coolidge. The controversial nub of the scheme is illustrated in the pig-selling problem set up above. The pig men are U. S. farmers--raisers of livestock, grain, cotton, tobacco. The philanthropist is the U. S. President Coolidge has been willing that the Government should set up a loan fund and a farm board to administer it. He has been unwilling that the U. S. should engage to administer the equalization fee, which he construes as involving price-fixing and as putting the Government directly into the buying and selling of various farm commodities.

During the House debate, the equalization fee plan was momentarily sidetracked. Into the Committee of the whole--which is the compact form the House takes during the reading of major bills--Representative Aswell of Louisiana introduced a bill omitting the equalization fee and asked that it be substituted for the McNary-Haugen measure. The Committee of the whole voted in favor. Hubbub then reigned, because the members could not agree as to precisely what had happened, whether a whole new bill had been substituted or just an amendment. When the whole House met, the McNary-Haugenites settled the matter by passing their bill, 204 votes to 121.

The bill went to conference with the Senate to have conflicts removed. The main conflict was as to whether the equalization fee should be adopted with or without a stabilization fund to postpone its operation.

What would next happen to the bill, upon which many a farmer's heart is set, remained a political uncertainty. President Coolidge stayed on record against the equalization fee (and Secretary Hoover, in a telegram to Indiana farmers, joined him). The McNary-Haugenites, on the other hand, talked of gathering a two-thirds majority in Congress and relieving the farmer in their own way, another Coolidge veto notwithstanding.