JohnClay:
Hmmm… well to be consistent, if she was living during the industrial revolution she should be against new factories because they can lead to lost jobs (of the crafts people), and in the computer age, computers can also lead to the loss of jobs… if she didn’t personally know meat-packers, etc, I thought their jobs wouldn’t be very important. I thought her objection would just be that imposed vegetarianism means less choice for self-centered consumers…
You may be right, this is getting pretty far afield of what I can answer. Objectivism like I guess most moral systems has some rules but a large number of ambiguities.
Let me quote exactly, rather than screwing up my paraphrasing. There’s an extra element she’s addressing, that of giving fertilizing to other countries.
If we cut back our appetite for meat, we would release large numbers of Americans to join the growing ranks of the unemployed. Cattle farmers would go bankrupt, then meat packers, canners, butchers, restaurant owners, leather manufacturers, innumerable allied industries, and the employees of all these enterprises.
For those who did not cut back their appetite, and for growing children who need solid nourishment, the price of meat would skyrocket out of reach. The list of bankruptcies would include those Iowa farmers who would not be able to survive, with their harvests shrinking for lack of the fertilizer that had been shipped to Bangladesh. Are these the conditions that would “reduce inflationary pressure on American food supplies”?