Demand for marijuana growing licenses or quotas will exceed supply, right?
At some point, someone will have to say who gets them. Who will say? And how? If the basis is past activity, How will the decider evaluate whether claims of historic growing are exaggerated?
And once the decider decides, what appeals will be allowed? If appeals are allowed, to whom?
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A tremendous place to start is “Prosperity Road: the New Deal, tobacco, and North Carolina,” by Anthony J. Badger. I’m reading it for the second time, this time making notes.
Historic base p 73:
Production during the years 1931-33 was to be the base for tobacco allotments. Famers who signed up for the program had those historic amounts then cut by 30 percent; their acreage not grown on rented to the federal government for $17.50 per acre; conforming (signing) farmers also got paid 12% of sales.
Nonsigning farmers got no payments, and paid a tax of 25 percent on their tobacco sales. That rate was chosen by the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.
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Late 1933 into 1934:
County agents took farmers’ reports of historic production of tobacco.
“[M]ost growers overestimated.” 91 County agents negotiated and adjusted amounts allowed. “Few were able to bring the production records that might have solved the problem.” 91
One practice, by at least one agent, was to list allotments publicly in local stores “and inviting neighbors secretly to inform him in their neighbors were overestimating.”
Once quotas were allocated, “It was a troublesome and time consuming task to measure some 500,000 fields in the cotton and tobacco counties of North Carolina. In a tobacco county like Nash or Pitt as many as ninety compliance supervisors were employed.” 92
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More to come.
The Center for New Revenue 