Anyone who has followed the serpentine twists of this year’s sugar bill through the House and on into the dungeon of the Senate Finance Committee knows that the visible signs of its progress—if it can be called progress — were not very pretty.
Its path was less a path than a gauntlet strewn with ambuscades. At every turn in the marble corridors, in every committee room where it was detained, little knots of determined men were lying in wait, each with a sheaf of amendments plus hammers and nails with which to affix them to a measure that looked stranger and stranger until it literally fell asunder and broke up into three or more entities that could not at this point be reassembled by all the king’s horses or all the king’s men.
There is the original Administration bill, with its country-by country allocations on the basis of deliveries during the critical supply periods of 1963-64. There is the House-passed bill that uses the allocation formula of the 1962 Sugar Act which favors Western Hemisphere sources. There are the proposals of Senators Fulbright and Williams for a simple six-month extension. Separate plans have been advanced by Senator Douglas, who wants an import fee, by Senator Morton, who feels that even the House bill does not sufficiently favor Latin American producers, and by Senator McCarthy, who wants import quotas based on actual deliveries from 1960 to 1964.
Many, including this newspaper, have deplored the machinations of lobbyists representing all kinds of domestic and foreign interests in confounding the issues involved in the sugar bill. Beet and cane growers are feuding as usual. Foreign suppliers are feuding with each other. Foreign policy and domestic farm policies are colliding at every step of the way. And so it goes.
Nevertheless, it is not only unfair but a little aside from the point to blame all this shoving and pushing on the lobbyists. These, after all, merely represent American and foreign business interests and a sizable number of foreign governments whose futures are deeply involved with every twist and turn of American sugar policy. If there are some who take advantage of this confusion for reasons that strike a number of critics as “crass,” there are others who rightly feel their very livelihood is at stake. They can hardly be blamed for fighting for it.
Who’s to Blame?
Where, then, does the blame lie? We would say it lies, in the considerations that do with sugar, as with any other commodity, in the foolish conviction that the determinations of Congress are in some way beyond the ken of the average person — superior to an overriding degree to any decisions that could ever possibly be reached in the market place.
If sugar had been left untouched, its marketing today would be determined solely by the price established by supply and demand. If foreign producers of cane could market their sugar here at lower prices than domestic beet or cane producers, there would be no problem. There might be no domestic beet or cane producers, but neither would there be any problem of choosing between foreign producers. If, on the other hand, domestic producers could beat the foreign competition hands down, would there be any question as to which (if any) foreign producers should be favored?
It is only because Congress decided that it, and it alone, should be the supreme arbiter concerning the source and the price of every pound of sugar sold in the United States that this awful impasse came to pass. In such a circumstance, who can be surprised at learning that Congressmen are the target of each and every interest that can be brought to bear? In such a circumstance, who can be surprised at learning that the (almost) annual debate over the sugar bill evidences traces of the worst kind of logrolling that have disgraced democratic government in this country since the machinations leading up to the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of 1930?
We admit — the editors of this newspaper — that some of our foreign friends and allies might suffer if sugar marketings here were determined solely by the laws of supply and demand, which is to say, by the laws of the market place. But who, after witnessing the deplorable results of Congressional horse-trading, could honestly say the market has in the slightest degree been improved by Federal intervention?
The fact is, it hasn’t been improved in one single degree, or tenth of a degree. It would, today, prove far less chaotic if there had been no Federal intervention whatever. Let all liberals who believe in Federal marketing controls pause over this. Let them consider only sugar for the moment, but then consider how far down the road to ruin their follies have already led them.
Reprinted by permission from The Journal of Commerce and Commercial, October 20, ¹965.
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Order
To organize one’s life, to distribute one’s time, to take the measure of one’s duties and make one’s rights respected; to employ one’s capital and resources, one’s talents and one’s chances profitably — all this belongs to and is included in the word order…. Order is man’s greatest need and his true well-being.
From the Journal of HEN 6¹ AMIEL (¹82¹-81)
