Jim Choate wrote:
On Mon, 22 Oct 2001, Steve Furlong wrote:
Then let them. A self-sufficient subsistence farmer won't be bothered by the trade his neighbors are carrying out. [1] His farm can be a neolithic bubble as the world progresses.
Bullshit, just wait until the first drought.
No man is an island, and no chunk of an ecosystem can be removed from that around it. Your 'self-sufficiency' is a logical fantasy.
To a point. "Free choice" in most instances, is also a logical fantasy. That's very clear just in the economic downturn of the last year, right here in the good ol' USA, and I can easily imagine what it's like in Bolivia or Guatamala. All of a sudden, one day I take my corn to market, and nobody buys. Hmmm. This actually happened to me long ago when I was running a sawmill. One day I showed up with a truck load of white cedar which was getting me around $800 @ thousand board feet. The man says, "Sorry, we're getting red cedar trucked down from Canada at $300." Hmmm. Well, red cedar ain't the same as white cedar by a long shot, but joe backyard builder hasn't a clue, he just looks at the price. Yeah, I adapted (sold the sawmill quick, for one thing), but I also had a lot of other options. OTOH, it took few years to figure things out, and I'm still not happy with the outcome. And I had a wife who could make good money. Lucky me. The thing is, mostly I'm seeing fatcat whiteboys sitting on their ass in Amerika talking about "free market" and free choice like they really know shit about what's going on in the world. Maybe we could relocate them to the hinterlands of Guatamala and see how well they adapt. -- Harmon Seaver, MLIS CyberShamanix Work 920-203-9633 Home 920-233-5820 hseaver@cybershamanix.com http://www.cybershamanix.com/resume.html