Cartels: Conspiracies in Restraint of Trade

After Losing Money for 17 straight years, in 1976 California orange grower Jacques Giddens finally sent a bumper crop to market. He was immediately hauled into court, charged with shipping too many oranges.

Giddens had exceeded a marketing quota set by the Navel Orange Administration Committee and enforced by the federal government. When Giddens exceeded his quota-less than 66 per cent of his crop-he was breaking the law.

"Right now I've got 13 acres of unpicked oranges sitting out there," Giddens said, "but I won't get anything for them because they're beginning to freeze. I can't pick them because I've already filled my quota, and there's no way to store oranges except leave them on the trees. In three more weeks they'll be junk.

www.libertyhaven.com...

Any thoughts?

If he is not losing any money doing it, he should donate the surplus to a charity, it would get him some publicity. Also, is he allowed to export his oranges?

XAOS

The exportations would apply to sales as far as donating his product that would involve donating time and recourses as well, spent preparing the product for donation.

In other words the effort would probably put him in the poor house, keep in mind this is 34% of his produce.

Basic supply and demand laws don't apply huh?

Limiting productive output huh?

Actually, I don't mind a bit of market regulation, and like manpower planning it can lead to efficiencies which might otherwise be unavailable because the regulators have useful information that is not available to the individual producer.

But, as a rule, for a supposedly free enterprise country which lets markets speak for themselves, the US has more tarriffs and more insane protections than any other economy in the world. Not only that, but the application of them is hypocritical to the Nth degree.