TROUBLED AGRICULTURE
Netboy, Anthony
Troubled Agriculture THE RECONSTRUCTION OF WORLD AGRICULTURE, by Karl Brandt. Norton. $4. TWO BILLION ACRE FARM, by Robert West Howard. Doubleday, Doran. $2.50. Reviewed by Anthony Netboy KARL...
...Howard's point of view is anti-New Deal...
...Brandt ignores—wilfully-or otherwise—the fact that free markets are an illusion in a world dominated by international cartels, monopolies, and trusts, and that it is the farmer in practically every country who takes the worst beating because he operates under one kind ©f price system while industrialists operate under another...
...Attached to Stanford University's Food Research Institute, he, like the institution, is technically sound and politically safe...
...In The Reconstruction of World Agriculture Brandt has written a portentous book—half history, half crystal gazing—with the dominant theme that markets must be free, capital allowed to flow into new investment, and trade kept reasonably unhampered by government restriction...
...This means that the nations producing agricultural surpluses should be allowed to dump their products (he does not add—at low prices)' into the industrial ?countries and receive manufactured wares (he does not say—at high prices) in exchange...
...This nice relationship must be maintained in order to effect the fullest "political and economic reconstruction of the life of the nations...
...Otherwise he would sink, as in the early '30s, into something like a state of peonage—even in so wealthy a country as the United States...
...It is a pity that a man who writes so well should write so foolishly...
...They cannot see that the war thoroughly has punctured the theory of the free flow of goods between countries and that the balancing of industrial versus agricultural nations has become an absurdity...
...It is only when the governments peg agricultural prices and hand out lavish subsidies that the farmer is in some measure bailed out...
...Reviewed by Anthony Netboy KARL BRANDT is one of the most erudite of the . German economists who have taken refuge in the United States...
...For example, he gives a cockeyed account of the New Deal efforts to aid the farmer, and comes out with the dictum that it created an agricultural bedlam...
...This dual system is so rigged that there is a continual pressure to pull down the price received by farmers for their goods while the cost of commodities they must buy tends continually to rise in terms of the farm dollar's purchasing power...
...On this assumption, he argues that world agriculture must be allowed to return so far as possible to prewar conditions...
...Yet there is need for an informal history of American agriculture...
...Summed up, he stands for political freedom, private initiative, and free enterprise...
...As a newspaperman working for the slick farm magazines, he stands for private enterprise (Curtis Publishing Co...
...HOWARD'S Two Billion Acre Farm is a free and easy account of America's agricultural history, written in a jazzy style, full of minute errors—dates inaccurate, names of people twisted, etc.—and about true a picture of our national development as a Hollywood film would be on the subject...
...The publication of a book like this in the year 1945 is but proof that the old line economists— and the German emigres especially—have failed to learn anything from World War II and that they are intellectually bankrupt...
...kind) and cooperation...
Vol. 9 • December 1945 • No. 50
