Farm Out! (was Re: Retribution not enough)

[Steve Furlong]

Harmon Seaver wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 
>       What? You're talking nonsense here. Of course they make part of their living
> selling crops --- what's all the bs about "forging his own metals" etc. Total straw
> man arguement.

Not at all. I evidently didn't make my point clearly enough. What
follows will attempt to proceed from "second principles", since I don't
want to take the time to go from first principles.

Since prehistory, the only person who was able to go completely his own
way, without having to worry about what anyone else was doing, was the
totally self-sufficient man. (Woman, whatever.) If you don't need
anything from anyone, you don't need to care if the price changes on the
goods or services they want or are selling.

(This post is concerned only with mutually agreeable economic dealings.
Use of force, whether by government or by other bandits, changes the
discussion.)

As soon as you start trading, such as for metal tools to replace the
wood, stone, and bone you'd have to use otherwise, you have to be able
to provide something they want in order to get what you want. If you've
been trading an acre's yield of corn for a metal plow, but now your
blacksmith is able to get his corn cheaper by efficient trade with
someone farther away, you'd better drop your price, do without the plow,
or learn to make your own. Proceed with this argument and you can be
guaranteed of being able to grow your crops in your own way only if you
don't need anything from anyone else, a return to self-sufficiency.

The argument doesn't change just because the scale changes. If a ten
thousand acre corporate farm is able to produce grain more cheaply than
a hundred acre family farm, the family farmers' "rights" have not been
trampled just because they can't make their living as they did any
longer. They can't compete in the new environment, and they can change
their methods, attempt to become self-sufficient, or die.

Let me emphasize, I'm still talking about pure free market here. ADM has
a very effective lobbying machine, and gets handouts (gasahol) which
makes them more economically competitive than they naturally are.


>       Look, I'll try to explain it in terms that perhaps even a city boy like you
> can understand.

Watch your assumptions. I've done plenty of farm work, all on family
farms, from planting and weeding by hand because the ground was too soft
for machines to shoveling cow shit. (And getting stepped on by the
malicious animals, but that only adds to the vindictive pleasure of
eating beef.) I much prefer computer consulting, thanks, and wouldn't
farm again unless my life depended on it.


Your theory about the ag schools and county agents and such may be
right; I don't know enough to comment on them.


SRF

-- 
Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel
  617-670-3793

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly
while bad people will find a way around the laws." -- Plato