The Farm "Fix"

Hardly had the November election ballots been counted before Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman began crowing. "Not since the Roosevelt landslide of 1936 has a Democratic candidate received such an overwhelming endorsement in rural America!" he cried. Farm-state votes, Freeman said, gave Lyndon Johnson a "mandate" for continuation of the Kennedy-Johnson farm policies.

So rosy were things down on the farm, in Orville's view, that he even began to feel perky about his own job, long the bitterest plum in the U.S. Cabinet. Said he in a recent speech at West Point, noting that he would soon begin his fifth year as Secretary: "That tenure, of course, is not a record; yet you don't exactly find five-year Secretaries of Agriculture hanging from trees." Peasants. Perhaps not, but last week the president of the U.S.'s biggest farmer organization, the 1,647,455-member American Farm Bureau Federation, in effect told Orville that hanging was too good for him.

"Attempts to interpret the results of the election as an endorsement of further Government intervention in agriculture are inaccurate and misleading." declared Charles Shuman. "Farmers," he said, "were influenced by the same overriding issues that affected the voting decisions of other citizens," namely, "peace and prosperity."

While that statement drew enthusiastic applause from the 5,000 delegates to the Bureau's annual convention in Philadelphia, Shuman raised the roof with his hardest-hitting attack yet on the role of Government in agriculture. "No self-respecting farmer wants to become a member of a permanently subsidized peasantry," he stormed, but "farmers already are far down the road in their dependence on Government payments for their livelihood." Just how far, Shuman made plain. Nearly 20% of this year's $12 billion in net farm income, or about $2.1 billion, he said, came in the form of direct payments from the federal treasury. For Shuman's money, this places farmers "in the role of beggars beseeching politicians for an annual handout."

Pushers. Shuman felt, moreover, that the Government was making hopheads of the farmers as well. "I think Government payments have something in common with the narcotics habit," he said. "Once on the habit, the victim becomes convinced he cannot live without the drug. In the jargon of the underworld, he's hooked. He'll do most anything to get his next fix, his next check. The pushers, in this case the Government bureaucrats and committees, constantly work to get more farmers hooked and dependent on payments." The upshot, Shuman said, "is very simple: the more that are hooked, the more the payments are, the more assurance of [bureaucrats], jobs and the perpetuation of the machine in power. It's a sad, sad commentary on the present situation. Well, that's the way of socialism."

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