There was a little bit of good news that came out while I was in the dark. The Supreme Court ruled against big government and for raisin farmers and property rights. Now the government can’t take farmers’ raisins.
Some of the worst farm programs were established in the New Deal era. Thankfully, the Supreme Court dealt a body-blow to one of them on Monday, at the same time winning a great victory for the cause of property rights in the case Horne v. Department of Agriculture.
The Raisin Administrative Committee is the federal government’s version of OPEC, but for raisins. Created by a 1937 law, it had (until Monday) the power to seize and destroy raisins without necessarily compensating farmers. The aim was to keep raisin prices high through artificial scarcity. Under the program, the government could do what it wanted with the raisins. Farmers had only a moderate chance of recouping the money from the raisins they lost, depending on whether the bureaucrats found a way to sell them profitably.
The Supreme Court, in a resounding eight-to-one decision, ruled against the raisin panel and the Obama administration’s defense of it. They did not do so because it is an abomination to a free society to have government dictate market outcomes in this way, but rather because the physical seizure of the raisins and the forced transferal of title to the government constitutes an obvious taking of private property.
Read the whole thing since good news is so hard to come by these days.
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