This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 1st, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Marvin Horn spent a decade fighting California's raisin cartel in court.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that Big Raisins can't simply

seize a farmer's crops, mumble a few words about future benefits, and then call it compensation.

Trevor Burris, a research fellow at the Cato Institute,

discusses the court's decision.

Marvin Horn is a raisin grower and handler in California

who he does both of things.

He grows grapes and then dri drives him in the sun and then packages

and his raisins and also buys grapes from other people and then packages his raisins.

Well there's an entity called the raisinin administrative committee. I'm not making this up. It is a New Deal era

entity based off of a law called the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937, which was really just part of Franklin Roosevelt's

obsession with cartilizing the whole economy as a way of fixing the problems of the

Great Depression. And many of those were struck down by the Supreme Court, but we still live in an agricultural system that is largely a product of the New Deal and is based on these cartels.

So the Raisin Administrative Committee is a group of 47 people, 46 of them are growers and handlers, one member of the public.

23 of the 46 are either directly working for sun-made raisins, which is the largest raisin producer, or indirectly

working for them.

And they decide every year.

They have the ability authorized by the government to decide how many raisins should be

on the market in order to keep the price artificially high.

The other part of this story is a pretty typical story of what, when farmers in particular

...