The Philadelphia Inquirer article “This Economy: What’s in a bottle of Pa. milk? Inequities” reports:
“….The problem is that the state protection is not working as well as its 1930s architects hoped because – gasp! – some of the milk produced by cows on Pennsylvania farms crosses state lines – sometimes to be sold outside of the state, sometimes to be bottled outside the state and then brought back in for sale.
“When milk travels, the board, which offers a cautionary tale on the failure of regulations to keep up with reality, is stymied by the U.S. Constitution’s interstate commerce clause…
“For example, an out-of-state bottler can buy Pennsylvania milk and evade the board’s reach. If the milk comes back into the state for sale at a store, the retail price will include the premium, but that money is lost to the state’s dairy farmers…
“Where does that money go?
Farmers figure it goes to milk processors… “
In the Kennedy administration, the USDA asked farmers to vote on which of two “support” programs they favored.
Farmers aren’t dumb. They know that if anyone else buys commodities when they’re cheap, and sells them when they’re high-priced, they’d make money on the deal. When the government does that, they claim that they’re losing money, and that it’s going to farmers. In fact, what the government is doing is keeping prices low for the benefit of food manufacturers, not high for farmers.
So farmers voted on both programs. They voted them both down. Get the government out of price supports, the farmers figured, and they might have chance to make some money.
Orville Freeman was Secretary of Agriculture then. “Never again!” he declared. And he was right. In the half century since then, they haven’t allowed the farmers to turn down so-called “price supports”.