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Valkyria Chronicles: Drums of War

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Silvis said:
This.

  • The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA):
    The AAA, enacted in 1933, was a New Deal program designed to address the overproduction of agricultural products and low prices that farmers were experiencing during the Great Depression.

  • Limiting Crop Production:
    The AAA achieved its goals by limiting the amount of land used for cultivating crops and restricting the number of livestock farmers could have.

  • Payment to Farmers:
    Farmers were paid to reduce their crop production, which in turn led to a decrease in supply and an increase in prices for agricultural products.

  • Wickard v. Filburn (1942):
    This Supreme Court case involved a farmer who was fined for growing wheat for personal use, even though it was not for sale. The court ruled that even if the wheat was for personal use, its production still had an impact on the market and therefore fell under the government's power to regulate interstate commerce, according to the National Constitution Center.


    This happened during the Dust Bowl.
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I'm aware of the AAA and its effects on the USA market. What I was asking about is a specific example of burning the crops by the order of the federal government.

Payment to farmers link just go to a google page with that topic searched and all I'm getting is modern stuff.

Wickard v. Filburn was the Supreme Court affirming the AAA by stating that Filburn didn't have the right to double his own wheat income is a good decision even if it is deeply flawed and has been used and abused in the decades after it was passed. Thing is what Filburn did was basically the sort of cheating that started the Dust Bowl in the first place.

One of the ways famines were historically started was by farmers producing as much cash crop as they could so they could get as much money on the market. The Supreme Court properly recognized that what Filburn did was harmful to the general price of wheat on the US federal market not because he personally made so much wheat, but because if he could do it so would thousands of other farmers and that would erode the price of wheat on the market.

It's not crop burning, it's preventing the sort of bad food stockpiling that led to crop burning.
 
Silvis said:
Ah I see.

So basically only the government should be able to decide the price of food.

That sounds like a great idea.
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So, two separate points here.

First, you describe the Dust Bowl as a famine. Note that "famine" means something a bit different from "there are specific individuals who are malnourished or starving." It means "food production has fallen to the point where the entire society lacks sufficient food on a systematic level." This is important because during a famine you have not only the problem of arranging food supply to specific individuals who most need it, but the problem of systemic lack of food and the secondary problems it causes. Such as the market price of food climbing towards infinity even while any distributor who still owns a stockpile of food hoards it rather than selling it, in the expectation of being able to charge even more exorbitant prices in the future.

So to be clear, was there a systemic national undersupply of food during the Dust Bowl?

Second, experience shows that government intervention, often fairly radical intervention including regulation of food prices, is better at preventing mass starvation during a famine than any other method. Laissez-faire economics, in which the government deliberately does not intervene in the market and continues to allow those who own crops to do as they please, sometimes causes especially ruinous famines, as the British Empire demonstrated in India and Ireland.

So are you accusing President Roosevelt's New Deal of committing what is at most a crime against property (the idea that growing large amounts of wheat on your own land and saying it was intended for your own direct consumption does not make you an exception to laws regulating wheat production), or the borderline genocidal crime of destroying crops to the point of forcing malnutrition or starvation on the population as a whole?
 
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Simon_Jester said:
So are you accusing President Roosevelt's New Deal of committing what is at most a crime against property (the idea that growing large amounts of wheat on your own land and saying it was intended for your own direct consumption does not make you an exception to laws regulating wheat production), or the more directly genocidal crime of destroying crops to the point of forcing malnutrition or starvation on the population as a whole?
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No I'm bringing up the point that those policies reduced the food supply even further when it was already reduced by the effects of the dust bowl.

And artificially increased the price of food at a time when a lot of people were very very poor already.

That's my problem with it.
 
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If we are looking at the dust bowl, and the larger situation surrounding food production at the start of the great depression, one of the key features was an ever decreasing price of food, and ever increasing cost to produce said food. If we are looking at the years before the dust bowl, farmers had effectively zero profit margin, and zero cushion when it came to the shocks of the stock market crash and the Smoot-Hawley act. The AAA and other such acts largely, although not entirely, were aimed at pushing the price of grain (and other crops) up above the cost to produce it.

What we learned from the Dust Bowl: lessons in science, policy, and adaptation - PMC

This article provides a review and synthesis of scholarly knowledge of Depression-era droughts on the North American Great Plains, a time and place known colloquially as the Dust Bowl era or the Dirty Thirties. Recent events, including the 2008 ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
 
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    • Scheduled vote count started by Ithillid on Apr 14, 2025 at 2:05 PM, finished with 81 posts and 29 votes.
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    • Silvis said:
    No I'm bringing up the point that those policies reduced the food supply even further when it was already reduced by the effects of the dust bowl.
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    The US was a massive-scale food producer during the period. Reducing food supply "even further" was not necessarily a policy mistake, because 'more food' is not always to the long term benefit of a society. After all, the Dust Bowl itself was caused in large part by the historic pattern of farmers tearing apart windbreaks and ignoring soil retention because they were trying to export more crops. When in the middle of an environmental disaster caused in part by food overproduction, deliberately cutting production is not necessarily a mistake, so long as the total amount of available food doesn't fall below the amount needed to feed everyone and as long as steps are taken to distribute the food.

    Artificially increasing the price of grain was specifically aimed at helping farmers, ironically. Because as Ithillid notes, crop prices had fallen to the point where it was becoming structurally impossible for farmers to make a living in much of America.

    In a laissez-faire market, the individual farmer has no recourse in this situation because many of his costs are fixed whether he grows crops or not; his best hope is to try and constantly increase production in hopes of at least managing to pay his mortgage and keep the family alive. But when everyone is doing that, it just makes the overall problem worse with each passing year. Because you're driving yourself and your farm into ruin in an attempt to win a race against, essentially, yourself.

    The Depression was a period when, ironically, the American family farmer was under tremendous pressure precisely because the nation was growing too much food, creating the danger of a longer-term agricultural collapse or a deepening of already-severe rural poverty. There was no realistic solution to this problem within the market economy, but any attempt by the government to regulate crop prices and address rural agricultural poverty was going to require the government to have some kind of actual authority to set rules.

    So if you "have a problem with that," I have to ask, what's the alternative? Let the market trends continue and bring about the effective collapse of the American family farm 50-80 years ahead of schedule?
     
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    Simon_Jester said:
    So if you "have a problem with that," I have to ask, what's the alternative? Let the market trends continue and bring about the effective collapse of the American family farm 50-80 years ahead of schedule?
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    In that situation. You are right there wasn't really a good solution.

    But I do believe there were solutions that did not require the Federal Government to be involved.
     
    Silvis said:
    In that situation. You are right there wasn't really a good solution.

    But I do believe there were solutions that did not require the Federal Government to be involved.
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    I'm not sure how to interpret this except as "I know there were no good solutions that didn't involve federal intervention, but I consider federal intervention to be inherently so bad that it's worth accepting millions of farmers being financially ruined, or even the outright collapse of the agricultural sector due to unsustainable practices burning out all the land, as long as there's no federal intervention."

    But is that really what you believe? I find it hard to imagine that you do.
     
    Silvis said:
    Not if they all did it together.
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    Why would they all do it together?

    You'd have to have thousands of farmers all agree to this, all the while breaking with this agreement is better for their survival (because they can sell more produce for the higher price than if they didn't), the various food processing companies are up in arms for the assault on their profit margins, and the federal government grabs the trust busting instruments on account of the farmers attempting to establish a monopoly capable of dictating prices.
     
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