I didn’t say Mexico doesn’t have farmland. I said it doesn’t have as much as the United States. Here’s the figures: Mexico has 243,457 square kilometers of arable land. The United States has 1,650,062 square kilometers of arable land.
This huge amount of arable land gave the American economy a big cushion against economic problems. If there was an economic crisis and factories were closing, people could just move to vacant farmland out west and support themselves rather than riot for bread. And when the industrial economy was growing you had a pool of farmboys anxious to move to the big city.
Yes, I’m familiar with the idea. But it works on resources like oil or gold or diamonds - not farmland.
Well, then you shouldn’t have said lots of natural resources, if you meant farmland. And is it your position that the US was successful because it had lots of farmland? Do you think the Soviet Union or China or India had a shortage of farmland?
I agree that their economies are quite free-that just goes to show you that one can have a universal welfare state in a well-regulated social market economy yet still have a free market. But of course, if we attempted any reforms along the lines of those countries, libertarians would denounce it as “statist” and “socialist”.
No, they go to show you that you can have universal welfare states in tiny countries with largely homogeneous populations. And even there you can expect trouble. Look up Sweden’s problems in the 1990’s and the gains that the far right is making now that immigrant populations have reached marginally significant levels. And there is considerable opposition to Nordic like reforms among the left in the USA too. The Swedish education system(post reform) uses a voucher system. Germany too has had problems because of a too generous welfare state. Many economists hold that it only survived the crash of 2008 because it was forced to make fairly painful reforms to its labour markets and unemployment benefits in the early 2000s.
Farmland is a natural resource. Why would you think it isn’t?
And, yes, my position is that a large part of the economic success of the United States was due to an abundance of available farmland. I’ve already described why that’s the case.
If you look at Russia, China, and India during the same period you’ll see they had a much lower ratio of farmland to population and it was one of the reasons their economies didn’t do as well as America’s did in the 19th century.
American farms, along with the farms of the EU, survive solely on huge public subsidies, without which most would be unviable. Third world farmers, on the other hand, don’t have such lavish doles to keep them going, and frequently find themselves competing with heavily subsidised crops dumped in their markets and even with crops handed out for free by the likes of USAID, who buy food in American to create artificial demand and then use it to drive native farmers out of business.
So, you actually believe that American farms would go out of business without subsidies, but that low tech third world farmers would dominate if not for those US farms dumping cheap products on their markets and driving them out of business? Is food just a luxury in the US then?
(I’m not disputing that there are farm subsidies btw, or that the US does in fact produce a lot of food at low costs in part due to those subsidies and that this makes locally grown produce less attractive in some cases…but you can’t seriously believe the overall theme of your post here…do you?)
At the present time, this is correct. And libertarians are the group that most regularly call for the elimination of all agriculture subsidies. Unfortunately both major parties, but most particularly the Democrats, consistently push for more subsidies to big agricultural corporations, and consequently we keep getting more and more such subsidies.
However, the topic of agriculture was brought up in this thread regarding 19th century America. There were no agricultural subsidies for the first few generations of American farmers.
Thanks for focusing back in on the topic. I think you are correct about there being no farm subsidies in the 19th Century-the first was the 1922 Grain Futures Act, I believe.
American agriculture would certainly not go away without subsidies. The subsidies keep production of certain crops artificially high. The existence of subsidies will create subsidy-chasing behavior, but without it you’d see more dynamic farming.
The subsidies have existed and exist for a lot of reasons, but one of the original now mostly defunct reasons was there was one a fear if you didn’t provide farmers with a cushion from the natural boom/bust cycle then too many farmers would go out of business and suddenly we wouldn’t be able to feed ourselves. The reality is that wouldn’t/won’t happen.
What is definitely true is many of the “true” small farmers (not those sole proprietor millionaire farmers, but ones who earn a moderate income from farming) don’t have enough acreage or production to be profitable in the current market without subsidies. These farmers simply lack scale to be successful in today’s market and there are certain large fixed expenses that come with farming that work out much better economically when you spread the cost over a much larger farm.
Without subsidies you’d see less production in certain crops that are being artificially emphasized and you’d see much more farm consolidation in big agricultural interests. You wouldn’t see American farming go out of business.
This is also mostly only true for some portion of farming. Something like 70% of farms in many States receive no subsidy at all. The subsidies tend to be concentrated in feed grains, cotton, wheat and rice. There’s a lot of demand for all of those, and if you take away the subsidies many farms would be able to profitably continue growing those crops but overall demand would go down as prices had to increase. This would probably mean some of these products which are almost ubiquitous in processed foods precisely because the subsidies keep them cheap would become a little less common on store shelves.
Many of the “expensive” products like tree nuts, avocados, honey etc receive almost no subsidy as they are quite profitable all on their own. Tobacco receives very little subsidy as well.
How about 17th century Amsterdam? Religious tolerance, fairly free trade economy, pro buisiness government oligarchic government, home away from home of John Locke, etc.
No direct subsidies, but I think that giving away free land (and killing/ethnically cleansing all those pesky injuns) isn’t exactly a free market solution, is it?
Back to the OP, I’d say yes, in the early years where one could move west, stake their claim, and do whatever without any taxes being levied. Often the law was one of the gun and neighbors banded together for protection. Schools were for whomever could afford them.
But later then government moved in. As one said “Their is one pesk worse than grasshoppers and that’s politicians”.
To me, it wasnt so much government intervention it was the women of the west. Consider Abilene Kansas. For years it was known for its bars and brothels but when large numbers of women came in, things changed. Women wanted safe streets, sidewalks, churches, schools, and civic areas like parks and theaters. The bars and brothels were eventually shut down and moved to the outside of town. It was the same all over the west.
I’m not sure that’s a fair point, actually. I’m not sure it’s terribly relevant to the point of whether or not the 19th century was an era of libertarian ideals. Conquest of land isn’t really libertarian or non-libertarian, it’s outside of domestic political theories.
The giving away of said land via the Homestead Act is also not that much of a subsidy, the market value of the land would have been extremely low and the Federal government had no means of utilizing it. In fact homesteaders served as living claim-strengtheners to the land. That’s one of the primary reasons the government wanted homesteaders, because they firmly entrenched American control over the land in question. So arguably the homesteaders were providing a type of service to the government and being rewarded with land ownership.
Not entirely different from how persons could be given grants of land during the Spanish Reconquista, it was recognized that this would help build up the Christian population on the Iberian Peninsula which was a necessity to hold onto any gains made against the Muslims.
There was a significant difference. In Spain, land grants were basically a remnant of feudalism. The King gave a piece of land to a local lord. The lord was given the land in exchange for a promise to fight Muslims not for working the land. The actual work was done by the peasants, who pretty much had been doing the same thing under the Muslim lords. So there really wasn’t any economic development - just a change of ownership.
In the American system, the land was given directly to the people who were working on it. The “peasants” owned their own land. And they were making farms out of what had been uncultivated land.