By now you must be thinking. “Oh no. Not those damned California Raisins again.” If you do we won’t blame you, but the recent SCOTUS Horne case is stuffed so full of absurdities that it just won’t go away. To see our take on it; click here. And we just came across another one; something that has escaped the attention of the many taking mavens who have been expostulating on the legal complexities of whether an-out-and-out uncompensated physical seizure of about one-half of a raisin farmer’s crop (47% to be exact) — is a taking within the meaning of the Taking Clause of the Fifth Amendment. So far, the answer to this oh-so-difficult question that has been in dispute and litigation for some 10 years, and the U.S. Supreme Court just sent the case back to the lower court to decide this excruciatingly difficult question. So we won’t know what the answer is for a few more years. Only in America!
But guess what? It turns out that a big part of the story has been missing from the legal discussions. Here’s how. Assume with us, if only for the sake of argument, that those raisins had been duly stolen from Mr. Horne by Uncle Sam. What would happen to them then? Part one is easy. They — or a part of them — would have been given to schools to provide lunch to the kiddies, evidently to teach them a basic rule of economics: you steal from A and give to B, thereby providing the latter with a free lunch. Didn’t they teach you that in Econ 101? But what about the rest of those stolen raisins?
An answer to that question is provided in today’s Los Angeles Times. See Robin Abcarian, Raisin Suit’s Legal Wrinkle, L.A. Times, June 19, 2013, at p. A2. Quoth the Times: After their taking, “[t]he [raisin] reserves are doled out for use in federal school lunches or sold at below-market prices overseas.” Emphasis added.
Crazy? Stark raving. The government steals raisins from American farmers in order to reduce market supply and raise prices, and then sells them abroad at artificially depressed, below-market prices. So American raisin consumers get to pay artificially inflated, higher domestic raisin prices, while foreigners get to enjoy our raisins at artificially lowered, below-market prices. Sounds crazy to us.
The “reasoning” behind that crazy scheme goes back to the days of the Great Depression, when farmers complained that they couldn’t get enough for their raisins when they sold them in the open market. Evidently, the idea that they may have been producing too many raisins for the American market never occurred to them. But even so, the Great Depression has been over for a few decades, and maybe it’s time for raisin farmers to be told that they now live in the 21st century and it’s time to grow up.