WHICH WAY FOR AMERICA?
Tolley, Howard R.
Which Way For America? By HOWARD R. TOLLEY IN 194:} with a farm population 10 per cent smaller than in 1918, the nation's farmers produced nearly 50 per cent more food on two per cent fewer acres...
...It presupposes, however—and this is where the farmer too frequently has failed to press his insistence —it presupposes a high level of trade with other producers who likewise are striving for the highest possible level of production...
...Its primary emphasis The Watch On The Rhine would be positive and progressive, stressing not only an immediate expansion of our domestic markets to include adequate diets for all our people—whether employed, partially employed, or unemployed—but also expansion of our foreign markets through international cooperation in lowering and removing barriers to trade...
...The strength of that compromise, however, will be determined altogether by the strength of our desire for the alternative of our choice...
...It's a weapon for farm defense, a shield against exploitation, not a foundation on which a strong and progressive national economy can be built...
...Somewhere in between lies the compromise course we shall probably follow, politics and established interests being what they are...
...Recent preliminary estimates by the Bureau of Agricultural Economics indicate that even under full Employment a program to insure adequate diets to families in the low-income brackets (under $1,500 per year) would use the product of some eight million acres of crop-land that otherwise would not be needed...
...This truth the farmer knows as a matter of course...
...A Vicious Alternative The farmer's proper second point of attack follows logically from the first: If a full domestic market is good, surely a full world market is even better...
...Only as this presupposition is a reality is it possible to have any fundamental equity in the division of labor or in the exchange of labor— services on which our modern civilization is built...
...To put the issue as simply as possible, shall we cut the farm plant to fit a restricted market or shall we make that market so effective that no cutting will be necessary ? Those are the obvious alternatives...
...Without that fundamental equity, certain balancing correctives must be instituted to equalize the price-advantages which the producer-for-a-price enjoys over the producer-for-abundance...
...War is a savage price to pay for that simple lesson in the basic economics of trade, but we are no less savage ourselves if, having learned the lesson at such a price, we proceed at once to ignore it...
...There remains the possibility of the compromise course I spoke of earlier as likely to be followed...
...Let's examine those alternatives, then, to determine if possible which really deserves our support and what we can do to support it...
...It becomes crucially important, therefore, behind which alternative each of us throws his weight...
...The farmer has learned in the past decade that these compensations—to be effective—must be implemented by some of the very restrictions he wishes to avoid, but the spokesmen in his organizations and in Congress are likely to continue to demand them until the more fundamental equity of full industrial abundance in exchange for full agricultural abundance becomes a reality...
...Which way shall we go...
...Already in the midst of war, with a full quarter of our total food production still being allocated to military and Lend-Lease uses, we have experienced temporary oversupplies of certain commodities...
...And in this rebellion against any restriction of his production, the farmer is unquestionably right...
...There must be something wrong, he feels, with a nation which can't succeed in planning it some other way...
...The answer, of course, is that there's nothing wrong with it...
...By HOWARD R. TOLLEY IN 194:} with a farm population 10 per cent smaller than in 1918, the nation's farmers produced nearly 50 per cent more food on two per cent fewer acres of crop-land than in that peak-production year of World War I. This amazing advance in agricultural technology was undeniably comforting to all of us—even to those few alarmists who had publicly announced their forebodings of prospective famine...
...Certainly any downward adjustment of agricultural production after the war to the level of only our own peacetime markets under conditions short of full industrial employment at home and full international collaboration will make any current measures seem trifling indeed...
...As nature's working partner, he instinctively believes that there must be some better answer to his economic problems than a planned denial of nature's bounty...
...It is at this point that the farmer's thinking should lead him to an absolute insistence on full industrial employment, the only possible means by which full industrial production can be assured and the only possible way in which he can be guaranteed a continuing full attendance of all his city customers in the market-place where his own all-out production must be exchanged...
...Shall we make freedom from want of food and clothing and shelter a reality for all our people...
...By 1950, according to rough estimates of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, the farmers of the nation could duplicate last year's record production with a 10 per cent further reduction in both manpower and crop-land acreage if it were necessary...
...It's a vicious alternative based in illogic and designed only to counter equally vicious elements of illogic in other segments of our economy...
...Such a course, though inadequate and disillusioning, can have elements of progress in it if we insist on having them...
...These elements would seem to me to include an insistence on downward adjustments in our total farm production only as a last resort...
...For the sake of his conscience, then, as well as his pocketbook, it would seem to me that the farmer's proper first point of attack on his postwar adjustment problem is not on his own farm but in the market-place where his products are exchanged...
...It's his business to produce...
...Or shall we return to prewar methods of restricting not only our agricultural production but industrial production as well in an effort to raise prices all along the line...
...From an economic standpoint, the postwar world is truly our oyster—we have but to choose to open it...
...Farmers Love To Produce Whatever your postwar hopes or misgiving's, those two simple statistical summaries outline quite clearly the adjustment problem which agriculture faces after the war...
...Farmers are most prosperous in wartime because in time of war our people are most fully employed and our allies have great need for our food...
...and there is no question—as I pointed out in my introductory paragraph—that the downward adjustments in agriculture that will be called for after the war, if we adopt restrictive policies and programs, will be considerably greater than at any time in the past...
...Urban Prosperity Vital Those who so argue confuse a high level of living with a high level of prices, and those plainly are not the same thing...
...For the farmer and the industrialist alike, economic progress means keeping pace with the available means of communication and transport...
...The level of prices may rise with restriction of either production or trade, but a high level of living— as a matter of simple arithmetic, of dividing a big or a little cake—is absolutely dependent on a h4gh level of production...
...It is there that he should insist that his all-out production be matched in peacetime with the all-out production of his city customers...
...As a method of adjustment, moreover, it loses its appeal and its effectiveness as the scope of the necessary adjustment broadens...
...It is not a prospect which farmers can look forward to with even a small measure of comfort...
...Restriction of production, like restriction of trade, doesn't add up to a plausible answer no matter how plausibly you propound it or how cagily you argue it as a safeguard for our American standard of living...
...And so for us to ignore in the postwar world what radio and air transport have done to expand the potential range of our markets would be for us deliberately to deny the natural fulfilment of our economic being...
...But such a compromise, it should be remembered, is at best only a poor substitute for a program of full employment based on full trade...
...So what can possibly be wrong, he asks, with the highest possible level of production, both farm and industrial...
...Employment for all our people is just as possible in peace as in war—the only difference is that in wartime we make full employment and international cooperation our first order of business whereas in times of peace wc have just naively hoped that both would happen as s! matter of course even though we went out of our way to erect insurmountable barriers—both internal and •-sternal—to the very trade, the full trade, on which both must be built...
...Although I think I have stated the alternatives fairly and accurately, there would seem to be no question as to which is the more desirable cou,rse to follow from the broad standpoint of total human welfare...
...The farmer loves to produce...
...The other alternative—limiting farm production to the effective demand in a restrictive economy—need be discussed only briefly...
...Stop" and "Go" signs on production, in other words, to be equitable must apply to industry and agriculture alike or some compensatory devices—parity payments, production payments, marketing payments, or what-have-you—are definitely in order...
...From the farmers' point of view, no other answer makes complete sense...
...Unless we take deliberate means to prevent it, trade —a two-way trade—automatically expands as distance to market shrinks in time...
...As a starting-point for the domestic program, a thorough-going school-lunch program and some form of Food Stamp plan for low-income groups would seem to be called for, since we have had satisfactory experience with measures of this type in the past...
...He continues to produce even when there is no market for his products at prices he must receive to make a decent living...
...If we have poverty in the midst of plenty, obviously the niggard is not in nature but in ourselves—and the answer just as plainly is to blame ourselves, not nature...
...This postwar prospect—altogether feasible as a result of improvements in plant and livestock breeding and in general farm technology already available— is alarming or comforting, as you prefer, depending on whether you fear or welcome peacetime abundance...
Vol. 8 • August 1944 • No. 34
