FDR’s AAA — The First Government Lockdown
“Curiously enough,” wrote John T. Flynn in his 1948 classic The Roosevelt Myth, “while [Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture Henry] Wallace was paying out hundreds of millions to kill millions of hogs, burn oats, plow under cotton, the Department of Agriculture issued a bulletin telling the nation that the great problem of our time was our failure to produce enough food to provide the people with a mere subsistence diet.” (Emphasis added.)
Today, Americans have endured a government-imposed lockdown of the U.S. economy, which has, in a matter of weeks, transformed a booming economy — with the lowest unemployment rate in half a century — into one with about 35 million Americans unemployed and talk of potential shortages of food. But our present situation is not the first time in our nation’s history that the government has been the instigator of intentional deprivation of its citizens.
As Flynn described it, there was a time in our nation’s history when it was official government policy to destroy both crops and livestock, at a time when many Americans faced serious malnutrition, if not outright starvation.
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