In the case that upheld the second AAA, _Wickard_ v. _Filburn_, (1942), a farmer had been fined for planting 23 acres of wheat, instead of the eleven acres the government had allotted him--notwithstanding that the “excess” wheat had been consumed _on his own farm_. Now how in the world, the farmer wanted to know, can it be said that the wheat I feed my own stock is in interstate commerce? That’s easy, the Court said. If you had _not_ used your own wheat for feed, you might have bought feed from someone else, and that purchase might have affected the price of wheat that _was_ transported in interstate commerce! By this bizarre reasoning the Court made the commerce clause as wide as the world and nullified the Constitution’s clear reservation to the States of jurisdiction over agriculture. The tragedy, of course, is that the federal government’s unconstitutional intrusion into Agriculture has not brought us any closer to a solution of the “farm problem.” The problem, when federal intervention began, was declining farm incomes. Today, many farm incomes are still low. But now we have additional problems--production controls that restrict freedom, high consumer prices, huge crop surpluses and a gigantic tax bill that is running close to six billion dollars a year. No matter what variant of the price support-production control approach we adopt, the solution to these problems continues to elude us. The reason government intervention has created more problems than it has solved is quite simple. _Farm production, like any other production is best controlled by the natural operation of the free market._ If the nation’s farmers are permitted to sell their produce freely, at price consumers are willing to pay, they will, under the law of supply and demand, end up producing roughly what can be consumed in national and world markets. And if farmers, in general, find they are not getting high enough prices for their produce, some of them will move into other kinds of economic activity. The result will be reduced agricultural production and higher incomes for those who remain on the farms. If, however, the government interferes with this natural economic process, and pegs prices higher than the consumer is willing to pay, the result will be, in Hamilton’s phrase, “troublesome.” The nation will pay exorbitant prices for work that is not needed and for produce that cannot be consumed.