The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible - Bastiat Institute

128 Chapter 22 • The Bazaar of Governments
If government
consistently
chose policies
that supported
entrepreneurial effort
and greater consumer
choice, they would
make their countries
inconceivably rich.
Jim Harris
? In the ideal
socialist state, power
will not attract power
freaks. People who
make decisions will
show not the slightest
bias towards their
own interests. There
will be no way for a
clever man to bend
the institutions to
serve his own ends.
And the rivers will
run uphill.
David Friedman 1973
Background
This chapter originated from an anonymous
offi ce memo: Farmer sells one cow to buy a bull
to produce more cows.
The idea of buying farm products to keep
them off the market and so raise prices, originated
with President Hoover’s Farm Stabilisation Act.
This was expanded to most major crops under the
“progressive” New Deal program of President
F. Roosevelt. While millions of consumers
went hungry during the Great Depression, the
Agricultural Adjustment Act began a programme
to pay farmers to destroy millions of acres of
food crops and cotton, and to destroy millions of
pigs and cattle. Offi cials eventually paid farmers
not to produce food, which had the same effect
as destroying it, but the effect was less visible.
Skilful use of the media portrayed President F.
Roosevelt as a man who cared about the poor
and downtrodden, despite making their condition
much worse with higher prices and less food
and cotton. In the 1950s, thousands of farmers
were fi ned for the “crime” of growing too much
food. These programmes have expanded in
various forms up to the present under both major
political parties.
References
Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty gives
some great alternatives and philosophy.
The Making of Modern Economics: The
Lives and Ideas of the Great Thinkers, by Mark
Skousen, is a provocative and humorous analysis
of the many schools of economic thought. He
reveals many surprising things about these notso-dismal
characters, who shaped economic
policy over the past two and a half centuries.
To fi nd out where you stand in your political
opinion, download “The World’s Smallest Political
Quiz”: http://www.self-gov.org/wspq.html.