Ron Paul Quotes
There is no reason, in a free society, that farmers shouldn’t be allowed to raise hemp. Hemp is a good product.
Paul, Ron. Interview by John Stossel. Stossel, Fox Business Network, 2011.
The Japanese Aggression in the Pacific had curtailed the navy’s supply of hemp for the large ropes that tethered ships. Nylon was not yet used for rope, and the navy provided seeds to Midwest farmers and would purchase their hemp crop. The marijuana was used as a recreational drug by relatively few people then even though there were hundreds of thousands of acres of marijuana growing throughout the Midwest. See {599550} for a similar effort at the time by, the Department of Agriculture.
Actually, Kerry was incorrect, but he had a point, There are about 110,000 employees of the U. S. Department of Agriculture and every state has their own department of Agriculture with employees. There are about 2 million farms in America. So there is a government agriculture employee for about every 15 farms—a ratio that no other occupation shares.
What happened is that farmers over the year became either industrialized mechanized agricultural enterprises or peasants and the later did exactly what Capper predicted—moved to the cities. Agribusiness thrived and small traditional farmers were ruined unless they adopted the new technologies.
At the time the vast majority of Americans were farmers. That is the tradition and reality which caused the Department of Agriculture to become one of the most important cabinet departments. However, by the 21st century the Department of Agriculture had over 100,000 employees plus many more consultants and contractors. They had done their job so well that productivity eliminated the need for most of the farms. And the number of people earning the majority of their living as farmers is less than 1 million. So there are only 10 farmers for each employee of the Agriculture Department.
This editorial from an Alabama newspaper in 1856 is a wonderful illustration of the animosity held by many in the South towards the North. It also shows the major difference in egalitarianism between the North and the South at that time. The only Southerners who could read were the upper class who were terribly fearful of the effects of upward mobility of whites in a slave free industrial democracy. “Mechanics” at the time referred to all skilled craftsmen.
Ronald Ernest Paul is an American author, physician, and retired politician who served as the U.S. Representative for Texas's 22nd congressional district from 1976 to 1977 and again from 1979 to 1985, and for Texas's 14th congressional district from 1997 to 2013. On three occasions, he sought the presidency of the United States: as the Libertarian Party nominee in 1988 and as a candidate for the Republican Party in 2008 and 2012. A self-described constitutionalist, Paul is a critic of the federal government's fiscal policies, especially the existence of the Federal Reserve and the tax policy, as well as the military–industrial complex, the war on drugs, and the war on terror. He has also been a vocal critic of mass surveillance policies such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the NSA surveillance programs. He was the first chairman of the conservative PAC Citizens for a Sound Economy, a free-market group focused on limited government, and has been characterized as the "intellectual godfather" of the Tea Party movement, a fiscally conservative political movement that is largely against most matters of interventionism.
