Raisins and Reason

On one hand, you might think that watching fruit dry is a task excellently suited to the federal government. It requires little or no brainpower, it is extremely unlikely to harm anyone and it keeps people who like the idea of working for the government away from dangerous things like matches and ideas.

On the other hand, federalizing the watching of fruit drying can create things like the Raisin Administrative Committee, a group which oversees a curious activity. Every year it guesses how many grapes farmers will grow and then decides if that amount is too much. See, if farmers grow too many grapes and make raisins from them, then the price goes down and some of them don't make enough money to stay in business.

If the Raisin Administrative Committee decides too many grapes have been grown, it waits until they have been properly dried by their respective farmers and then comes in and carts some of them off. Without paying the grower a dime.

These purloined fruit are then stored and used by the Raisin Administrative Committee as they see fit. As the story notes, they may be sold overseas or fed to schoolchildren or cows -- whatever takes them off the U.S. commercial market for raisins and artificially shrinks supply so that the prices don't crater. The program began after World War II -- the U.S. military had been buying a lot of raisins to send to soldiers overseas as snacks, but fewer soldiers meant a major raisin-buying customer was no longer in the market. In order to keep the prices something near the high end that growers had enjoyed during wartime, a federal regulation created the raisin reserve and eventually the Raisin Administrative Committee.

And it has existed ever since.

It would be one thing if the Raisin Administrative Committee compensated the growers for their reserve confiscation, but they don't. Any money it makes from selling the reserve is used to fund its activities, with only what's left over going back to the growers. And as the story notes, that leftover amount is very often just about zero.

The story is about a guy who in 2002 decided a post World War II regulation had outlived its usefulness and started selling every raisin he produced instead of "donating" them to the Raisin Administrative Committee. The Committee hired a private detective to observe him doing so and then charged him with numerous violations of the Marketing Order that created this mess. He hired the lawyer that killed the California Raisin marketing campaign that sold a lot of T-shirts and plastic figures but not too many raisins.

This year the Supreme Court told a lower court it needed to re-think its decision on the matter; it had said it didn't have jurisdiction but the Supreme Court said, "Yes, you do."

When I read this I thought about buying some grapes and using our fine Okie sun to dry them out for a couple of weeks and creating my own raisins. But then I remembered Monday that I'd spotted that mysterious black Humvee with government plates at a restaurant where I happened to be eating, and I wondered just what they might hear through the grapevine.

Raisincrime is thoughtcrime.