Socialism

[The Conservative]

The Irish Potato famine happened as a combination of potato blight (and they were only growing one kind of potato so were susceptible to complete crop failure) with landlords owning most of the arable land and exporting most of the food to England where market prices were higher.

It was definitely partly a failure of not containing capitalism. The pursuit of profit does not always end in good outcomes. People who believe that worship money.

Sounds a lot like our Midwest corn empire, actually.

Only because our government thought it was smart to use corn as a fuel source.

[SuburbanFarmer]

The Irish Potato famine happened as a combination of potato blight (and they were only growing one kind of potato so were susceptible to complete crop failure) with landlords owning most of the arable land and exporting most of the food to England where market prices were higher.

It was definitely partly a failure of not containing capitalism. The pursuit of profit does not always end in good outcomes. People who believe that worship money.

Sounds a lot like our Midwest corn empire, actually.

Only because our government thought it was smart to use corn as a fuel source.

I don't think anyone actually believed that it was a 'smart' idea. It was a direct handout to Big Ag lobbyists. They have to justify the subsidies somehow.

[DBTrek]

Unless ... you know... the subsidies happened way before big Ag.

Hint: they did.

[TheReal_ND]

Yeah the thing about corn in America is that it in no way shape or form resembles capitalism. There are at least a couple dynamics worth pointing out here. We have essentially the largest bread basket in the world. I wouldn't be surprised if you stacked up the entire world to just us, they would be comparable. So one of the interesting things about this are the farm subsidies. The whole history of farm subsidies are kind of a messy entaglement between the government and banks which basically put an end to small farmers. This is something that would actually merit it's own thread and discussion. I'm not that well informed about it however. Anyway, over time this policy became kind of dressed up as a national defense measure. And it's true enough. We can feed ourselves for a very long time if the whole rest of the world was to just disappear. We would hardly notice it food wise. But it's also a foreign policy tool. Obviously we can buy off developing nations and influence them with minimal cost. We also subsidize farm products intended to maintain a massive market share of those products and wipe out any competition. But really at the end of the day it's less about subsidies and more about the technology of modern farming. It has become incredibly efficient in many ways. And not only that, we also maintain a large reserve of natural gas that is used to make fertilizer. It involves a lot of industry to make in any scale and, it also makes explosives. Gun powder. So for us, it is much more stable to just ship food overseas rather than allow them to develop their own petroleum based fertilizing plants. If they are even capable of such a feat at least.

Tldr; our agriculture industry has very little to do with capitalism and a lot to do with the state.

As far as ethanol goes I don't know enough about it to weigh in either way.

[The Conservative]

Sounds a lot like our Midwest corn empire, actually.

Only because our government thought it was smart to use corn as a fuel source.

I don't think anyone actually believed that it was a 'smart' idea.

That’s the point genius.

[brewster]

I don't think anyone actually believed that it was a 'smart' idea. It was a direct handout to Big Ag lobbyists. They have to justify the subsidies somehow.

Don't forget the Iowa Congressional delegation, and that sucking up to Iowa because of the ridiculous "1st in the nation Caucuses" is a primary cause of this bad policy. Keep the corn prices high and you've got their vote!

[SuburbanFarmer]

I don't think anyone actually believed that it was a 'smart' idea. It was a direct handout to Big Ag lobbyists. They have to justify the subsidies somehow.

Don't forget the Iowa Congressional delegation, and that sucking up to Iowa because of the ridiculous "1st in the nation Caucuses" is a primary cause of this bad policy. Keep the corn prices high and you've got their vote!

Exactly. And just like the MIC, that train will roll over anyone, for as long as possible.

[TheReal_ND]

We used to look at society as having some kind of duty to its individual members. That was in fact the view going all the way back to the stone age, or the origins of humanity itself.

The role of the elite, or the ruling class, or the state, or whatever was at the top of a social order and charged with managing it, was to serve the people by providing them with a path to work, to do the right thing, and to be rewarded for doing so.

Now, somehow, we’ve decided that society owes the individual absolutely nothing, that it is every single atomized person’s own duty to simply figure out a way to make their own lives work.

At the same time as the system owes you nothing, there is an entire grid designed to control every aspect of your behavior.

It would be one thing if we had a completely lawless “every man for himself” type system, where you could do whatever you wanted to whomever you wanted. A Mad Max type of scenario. Then the people with power would rightly be able to say they owe you nothing.

Funnily enough, if a Mad Max scenario did break out, people would instinctively form tribes that protected each other and provided the ability for men to form families and play a meaningful role in the group. (That actually was depicted in Mad Max: Beyond Thuderdome.)

Part of the problem is the alleged dichotomy between the state and society, a dichotomy which should not actually exist. The tendency to make the distinction between the two social constructs so severe is a result of taking certain ideas from the enlightenment to an extreme that no enlightenment thinker ever would have imagined possible. Any rational person would conclude that the role of the state is to serve the people. When you push the concept of individualism as far as it has been pushed, the logical conclusion would be that the state should be abolished. But instead we have a massive state and no clear explanation of whom it is serving.

Both stated paths – that of conservative and liberal – lead to further atomization of the individual, as we are further stripped of our humanity and shaped into the perfect consumer.

We have stopped being a society. We are now nothing more than a global marketplace, where every human interaction is treated as a transaction.

This is a gigantic disaster and the cost is human beings.

[SuburbanFarmer]

You must be back on your meds. You’re making a lot of sense lately.

[TheReal_ND]

You must be back on your meds. You’re making a lot of sense lately.

I was just cutting and pasting from a daily Stormer article.

It kind of sums up how I feel. I'm not that good a writer.

I've also started micro dosing modafinil because my boss never gives me a day off and I sleep like a sack of garbage.