almostinsane
Well-known member
Indeed. Those farms will claim permanent subsidies and tax exemption because "racism" is causing them to fail.
And so it begins....
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Indeed. Those farms will claim permanent subsidies and tax exemption because "racism" is causing them to fail.
Whitestrake Pelinal
Like a dream without a dreamer
Bury the dead, feed the living.
Or, ya know, chew over centuries-old grudges and transgress against those who are innocent. Seize the wealth of the diligent and use it in ways they loathe.
Didn't Zimbabwe reverse course real fast on that once their harvests went into the tank?
I mean sure, the damage was done by that point. Here in the US I don't see that happening. Most Farming is done by Agricultural megacorporation, and no one who doesn't want to sell their land isn't going to be forced to do so. This isn't immanent domain and even then the Government loses half the time. There isn't anything stopping Black farmers from buying their own land and starting up a farm. Many just don't do it for their own reasons. Sounds like Mother Jones is being edgy and wishing something like what happened in Africa would happen here. No way this survives a SCOTUS challenge.
I mean sure, the damage was done by that point. Here in the US I don't see that happening. Most Farming is done by Agricultural megacorporation, and no one who doesn't want to sell their land isn't going to be forced to do so. This isn't immanent domain and even then the Government loses half the time. There isn't anything stopping Black farmers from buying their own land and starting up a farm. Many just don't do it for their own reasons. Sounds like Mother Jones is being edgy and wishing something like what happened in Africa would happen here. No way this survives a SCOTUS challenge.
D
Deleted member
Guest
I don’t believe in lying. Our government already has explicit racial preference programs and those programs exist because there are objectively differences in how different ethnic groups perform in America. The demands of African-Americans for redress from slavery are a political matter, because they threaten the unity of the nation, and so their demands must be addressed in some manner. They’re already here and we can’t escape that fact. You cannot just command, by personal preference, that the African-American nation instantly disappears into the melting pot. It can’t, hasn’t and won’t happen.
I want to break the wheel. Relocating distressed urban populations to abandoned farmland has worked in the past in other nations, and hasn’t been tried yet in this case on a scale serious enough to succeed. And, if our Republic is going to survive at all, we need to reinvigorate Jefferson’s agrarian civil society. This is probably the “least worst” government intervention to address the African-American population.
Arlos
Sad Monarchist
Giving farms to poor people is a dumb idea in the first place, I don’t know how it is elsewhere, but here, unless you work for a big name in the sector, any independents work themselves to the bones only to end up poorer for it at the end of the day, usually ending in debts up to their necks until they folds to a corporation or suicide.
D
Deleted member
Guest
Well, we need massive structural reform of the agricultural sector to support small farmers and an agrarian yeomanry in general in the USA. My own policy prepares would be far more comprehensive I assure you. But this is a small element of a good idea, if you will—which could still fail disastrously if implemented on its own.
Arlos
Sad Monarchist
Fair enough, I personally support farmers myself, buying local products and all that, but the story they tell me sometimes...*sigh*
This sector need massive change, I heard everyone in my country speak about doing something about since I was toddler(in the same breath as industrial relocalisation), politicians, journalist, « intellectuals » but the situation keep getting worse years after years, and it’s been going on for decades by now....
I guess it’s technocrats for you, they talk a lot, but act very little.
Anyways, sorry for the derails, and the sort of rant.
You're in France correct? I thought your agricultural sector was fairly solid. Am I wrong in thinking that?
Arlos
Sad Monarchist
Unfortunately, yes.
Make no mistake, we still have a fairly solid agricultural sector, but it’s been bleeding to death over the years, crushed to death slowly by debts, unprofitability, cut-throat business tactic, ecologist, a really uncooperative state, suicide, and the fact that nobody in the cities really has the work ethic to do this kind of work anymore.
To put into perspective, we had around 600k farmers in 2010, and I think 2m in 2000? Today, we have around 400k.
This whole idea misses some basic facts that render it...well, impractical at best, actively harmful to everyone at worst.
Let's break down questions about the 'best' case scenario first:
1) The land people will *willingly* sell to this idea is not likely the best land, it will be land not worth the profit margin or tax burden for them to keep. So what good will it be for the purpose put forth?
2) How many inner city blacks *want* to move to areas where they are rather alone, both geographically and possibly socially, hours drive from sporting venues, concerts, close medical care, and cheap gas/travel costs, and other things mostly found in urban areas?
3) How many blacks want to be farmers, more than say IT techs, sports players, corporate execs, marketing professionals, any of the other myriad occupations found mostly in urban centers and found sparsely elsewhere?
4) How many urban blacks want to deal with things like coyotes or prarie dogs, or any of the other large amount of pests that are part of maintaining an active farm/ranch?
5) How many urban blacks want to build families in these locations, and try to convince their children to stay on the farm for their livelihoods?
Those are questions you need to answer for the *best case* scenario to have even a chance of working.
If you start trying to get land from people via imminent domain, or by pressuring them to sell at less than market value to help this goal, you can easily see racial tensions get much worse.
Let's break down questions about the 'best' case scenario first:
1) The land people will *willingly* sell to this idea is not likely the best land, it will be land not worth the profit margin or tax burden for them to keep. So what good will it be for the purpose put forth?
2) How many inner city blacks *want* to move to areas where they are rather alone, both geographically and possibly socially, hours drive from sporting venues, concerts, close medical care, and cheap gas/travel costs, and other things mostly found in urban areas?
3) How many blacks want to be farmers, more than say IT techs, sports players, corporate execs, marketing professionals, any of the other myriad occupations found mostly in urban centers and found sparsely elsewhere?
4) How many urban blacks want to deal with things like coyotes or prarie dogs, or any of the other large amount of pests that are part of maintaining an active farm/ranch?
5) How many urban blacks want to build families in these locations, and try to convince their children to stay on the farm for their livelihoods?
Those are questions you need to answer for the *best case* scenario to have even a chance of working.
If you start trying to get land from people via imminent domain, or by pressuring them to sell at less than market value to help this goal, you can easily see racial tensions get much worse.
So the situation is still salvageable. Macron will need to institute reforms to turn things around. Any ideas what to suggest?
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Creating a social class of welfare farmers, whose continued lifestyle is dependent upon government largesse rather than the economic viability of their lifestyle, will not help anyone achieve financial and social independence.
Instead, you will be creating a class of serfs. Just as Democrats have used the welfare state to create a class of serfs in ghettos.
This will solve nothing, create more problems, and spend billions to trillions along the way, just like the welfare state.
and in 2 years the boomers start retiring in mass so that tax income is gone, and is replaced by a massive tax burden and the credit crunch comes too, so those billions not there.
As long as these demands carry with themselves the slightest chance of getting profits from the rest of America merely on the face of such a demand, they will never cease, at least not for long. Freedom and citizenship in quite an immigration magnet country didn't satisfy it (quite a boon, relative to the fates of slave populations in most other places), even though it was paid for with blood of already free Americans.
Civil rights didn't. The economic generosity of "Great Society" didn't.
Whatever idea you have, you can expect the next generation, or the one after it, not remember that redress, it being either taken for granted or squandered by most families, get reminded of the opportunity of getting something valuable merely for complaining, and continuing that scheme. They will have no reason not to, because there is no price on trying. The mere possibility is a temptation that's hard to resist, because it is a free lottery ticket. Would you throw it away? You either win nothing, or you win something, and regardless of that, you get another ticket in next few decades.
The "melting pot" idea worked when it worked and as it worked - right now, everyone knows that America has no intention of being a united society and culture - ask white liberal arts professors and lumber town blue collar workers about their cultures. Both represent some kind of culture that one would call American, but it doesn't take a sociologist to say that this is not the same culture, neither of them feels like assimilating to the other one, and neither can be claimed as immigrants that can be required to assimilate. The rest needs to be handled by federalism, good governance, and "live and let live" principles. Which also includes different groups having different outcomes in various aspects of life and not expecting the government to come and "equalize" them if they aren't happy with theirs.
Its a noble idea and good at its time, but pure fantasy in current time and current USA. And not just for political reasons, but for mere macroeconomic ones.
Namely, there isn't enough farmland to create an agrarian civil society with either the numbers or the money to counterweight the urban populations in either more than they already do - and on top of that, the remaining urban populations African-American will care about as much about "their" representatives in "agrarian civil society" as the mentioned white liberal arts professors care about the opinions of white rural folk.
Why isn't there enough farmland? Its pretty simple. According to this, there are about 900 million acres of farmland in USA.
Lets take this as a sort of approximate yardstick for the economics of small farms:
It is a study of minimum land needed to achieve certain income level for a small farm with various sets of circumstances.
Its pretty old, so lets rescale the highest option, 6000$ in 1969, to modern USD - its a factor of about 7.1, yielding 42600$. Seems like an appropriate minimum target income for a family of "agrarian civil society" in a cheap, rural region. According to the study, this requires almost 500 acres. You could say there was a lot of advancement in agricultural technology since 1969, so lets be optimistic and make it 200.
Lets ignore all the annoying details of talents, incentives, abilities, land redistribution, competing with large farms national and international on economy of scale, and so on, and lets see how many families can possibly do it.
900 million acres divided by 200 gives us 2.25 million families able to live solely out of their own farming business. 10-15 million people. Some chunk of that potential number already exists, and the rest would necessarily live in roughly the same geographical area.
Even if you squeezed down the farms to 100 acres and increased the total farmland by half through marginal land use, you would still have 6.75 million families, including almost a tenth of US population. And that's a very optimistic number.
Long story short, this isn't a feasible way to revolutionize social dynamics across the country.
The closest feasible thing i could imagine working that is similar to this idea, is to keep the spirit rather than the letter of the idea, and expand this ideal of society to all forms of businesses operated by the owner with the help of family and maybye few hired workers.
Namely, small businesses. There's almost 32 million of them already (and fun fact, almost 2/3 of their owners are fine with Trump).
Some would own more than one per family, but still, you start with the number that's several times above the highly optimistic maximum for the farm option, and the theoretical maximum for that one is far higher.
If by some combination of squeezing big business, incentives and reforms you could double that, there would be a small business per every 6 people in USA, and not accounting for variances, a 3 generational family with 2 children per generation would be statistically highly likely to own a business.
EU delenda est. Thats a necessary, but far from sufficient part. With such a bureaucratic colossus highly intertwined into every smallest aspect of agriculture, pushing through good reforms would be practically impossible.
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AnimalNoodles
Well-known member
they are..in savings and retirement accounts
Why not just send them to Africa at that point? No more "historically oppressed"-eternally disadvantaged populations in the US, and plenty of cheap land with development opportunities over there. Just as feasible as land seizures.
Poorer immigrants have come and overcome harsher conditions, and established capital and familial wealth, and not devastated and destroyed cities like Baltimore and Detroit. Chasing the wealth, and destroying it with crime, high preference, and poor work ethic.
Lets not have them destroy our farmlands too, we've seen what happened in Zimbabwe.
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the strong backs are gone, the tax dividends shrink and raiding the peoples savings is a trick that maybe works once. The fincial tide for most of the world is one with fewer workers, fewer tax payers and less money.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
A lot of economies are going to have to wrestle with the fact that the old way of doing things isn't going to work anymore. What's worse is that, despite many warning that this day would come, nobody took the bigger picture seriously and made plans for this eventuality. Oh sure, some made a few plans for elements of what's to come; the Japanese for example is trying to shift their economy to become ever more reliant on automation, while we here in America had the bright idea of relying on immigration to bolster our lopsided age demographics. It's not going to be enough though, and things are going to change drastically.
Its going to suck, but no one wanted to do reforms and so we are going to hit the wall at full speed.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
Which isn't even getting into all the infrastructure that's been in sore need of maintenance or outright replacement for decades; which wouldn't have been a problem when we actually had the money to finance such a thing, but by the time it all starts failing on us, it's doubtful that we still will. We had all this money, and yet we completely failed to invest it in the one thing that would most benefit our nation going forward, even during the hard times; the infrastructure.
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