Today at SCOTUS: Property Rights vs. USDA Crop Seizures The federal government seeks to confiscate raisins without paying just compensation to raisin farmers.

Reason reports:

According to the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the government must pay just compensation when it takes private property for a public use. Three years ago, in the case of Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that command, declaring that the government has a “categorical duty” to pay just compensation when it “physically takes possession of an interest in property.”

Yet according to the Obama administration, the Fifth Amendment places no substantive check on the federal government’s power to seize tens of thousands of tons of raisins without paying just compensation to raisin farmers. In oral argument this morning, the Supreme Court will consider the legality of that federal claim.

At issue today in Horne v. United States Department of Agriculture is a federal regulatory scheme which dates back to the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937, a New Deal law designed to raise agricultural prices by tightly controlling the amount of agricultural products that went to market. For raisin “handlers” such as family farmers Marvin and Laura Horne of California, what this means in practice is that each year they are required to turn over a certain percentage of their crop to the federal government, or else pay the government the dollar equivalent of that crop, plus certain fines. The federal government then enjoys exclusive control over those raisins, and may opt to sell them for export, or put them to other use, such as in school lunch programs. To put that in perspective, in 2002-2003, the Hornes and other farmers were told to hand over 30 percent of their raisin crop, which amounted to 89,000 tons. In return, the federal government paid nothing.

Isn't it long past time to get rid schemes to artificially limit the supply of raisins?