It happened. It's an historical fact.
Just one of the abuses of Roosevelt's Agricultural Adjustment Administration whose actions were declared unconstitutional by SCOTUS in 1936.
You are correct.
The Agricultural Adjustment Administration , a New Deal colossus intended to do for farming what the NRA had done for business. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration involved an adaptation of the Soviet method of confiscation. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration was hoping to shake up agricultural markets by restricting supply through confiscating excess production and destroying it as waste. Isn't this still done with milk, I know it used to be? The cash to pay for this effort was to be raised by taxing commodities processors .
The Agricultural Adjustment Administration had success to start with. Agricultural income increased by 50% in Roosevelt's first term. Some of this increase, however, was attributable to terrible droughts. These, ruining thousands of farmers in the Great Plains, caused cuts in supply and contributed to higher prices for crops produced elsewhere. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration acreage quotas also led some landlords to evict tenants from their lands. Moreover, as the AAA improved farm prices, it forced consumers, millions of whom lacked adequate food and decent clothing, to pay more for the necessities of life. Roosevelt, it seemed, was fighting scarcity with more scarcity.
Over a two-year period, while millions of Americans went hungry, the federal government spent over $700 million confiscating grain, slaughtering livestock, dumping milk, and burning textile crops .
And lets not forget more of his way left leanings, the NRA. The NRA was adapted almost entirely from "corporatism," the economic system of Italian fascism.
