One of the glories of American farm policy is that, whenever you think it cannot get any loonier, it promptly finds a way of doing so (United 31). This is an accurate statement when referring to farming guidelines over the past few decades. Through the years, U.S. farmers have faced a tremendous amount of hardships whether dealing with fluctuating prices or declining incomes. Whats worse is that many of these hardships can be traced to the ever growing, not to mention fickle, legislation enacted by Congress. Farmers have always been aware of the risks involved in agricultural production. However, these risks have grown recently and farmers are being pulled out from under their blankets of family tradition in order to deal with a failing industry.Since the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, the U.S. government has been subsidizing agriculture. There have been many arguments in order to justify this large government spending. First of all, advocates contend that farmers are at the mercy of the market whereas they cannot control product price as those they buy goods and machinery from do. Therefore, they are at a large disadvantage because of their pure competition status. Secondly, farmers must deal with natures disasters such as droughts and floods whereas most other industries dont have this problem and therefore dont need government help to stay afloat (Brue 655). From these concerns stemmed the parity concept, which basically stated that prices received by farmers for their goods and prices they paid for anothers goods should remain proportionate and/or constant. Whatever a farmer paid for something as compared to the value of what he got in return should remain steady regardless of market factors. The benefits of this to the farmer can be understood when looking at prices paid and received by farmers in 1999. While prices paid increased by 14 times, prices received increased by only seven (Brue 656). Another form o...
