For all you folks who love government

Let's look at AAA for a minute. In 1934, the year after AAA, one of the only industries that really prospered was the fertilizer industry. It prospered because in record numbers farmers took their $10 an acre and bought fertilizer to increase their yield on the other three quarters. When we look carefully at what farmers were doing, they were told they could take a quarter of their land out of circulation. Many of them took their swamp out of circulation. Some had a forest, or heavily treed area and they took that out of circulation. And the bureaucrats found furthermore, that some farmers were secretly growing crops even when they were paid not to do so. Isn't human nature disgusting? And so the government sent agents around, to measure the land to make sure they were taking the proper amount out. Now as a young college professor many years ago, the first time I encountered my chairman of the tenure committee and got a chance to have a long talk with him, he told me his first job was with the AAA, measuring land. And like a silly untenured professor, I said: "Oh, did you get bribes and payoffs?" And the stupidity of that occurred to me because then I thought that if he says yes, then he may expect me to give him a bribe for tenure. He was a charming Southern gentleman, and said, "Well, yeah, but the best offers I could get were a pair of new tires, but I never got too many good ones; other people got the good ones." I think you're getting the drift of my story. People were hired to measure the land, and some of them were corrupt, and so we had to pay people to look in on the people who were measuring the land. By the way, is the funding for this from an independent source of revenue that the government has, or is it from taxpayers?

Well, the next thing that happened was that even the people checking on the people couldn't be trusted. And so the government now bought a fleet of airplanes and drove over the land to do aerial photographs of the land to see if anybody was planting something where they shouldn't be and getting illegal payments. Some people finally said, "What are we doing? The government now has pictures of all of our lands and our houses and everything like that." Once you ask for the government aid, the government controls come shortly thereafter.

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Aaron wrote:As I've said before, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.