From: Spike (spike66@comcast.net)
Date: Fri Aug 22 2003 - 20:25:05 MDT
-----Original Message-----
From: Robbie Lindauer
...Now two family members must work to support a family of
four. Then only 1...
Depends on what you mean by the term "support". If
one is satisfied with the standard of living they
had "then," one minimum salary is way more than sufficient
to make it happen. We expect more now, so it should
come as no surprise that it costs more. Earning a
subsistence level survival is cheaper and easier now
than ever before, and getting more so all the time.
One needn't even work: standing on a city streetcorner
with a "Will Not Work for Anything" sign will get you
all the donations needed to survive.
...Then, you could pay for a piece of land capable of
sustaining your own family within 7 years by working...
Today you can earn enough to support yourself in
a similar manner by working only a few months.
Look around you, Robbie. Farmland is as cheap as,
well, dirt. It costs practically nothing. If all
you need to do is eat, like the "then" people, it
is so simple even the hippies managed it, after
a fashion.
But there is little need for all that effort. Most
farmers will let poor people glean the fields after
a harvest today, and there is *plenty* of discarded
clothing available for nothing or nearly so, clothing
much more comfortable, durable, practical and even
fashionable than anything the "then" people could
have managed.
There is plenty of land in the U.S. which cannot
be farmed *profitably* for various reasons, but
which is still perfectly farmable for food production
on a family scale, as demonstrated by the Amish.
This land can be had for a few hundred dollars an
acre, all of it you want. Granted, it might not
be near any cities or actual roads, but it has
water and good soil, land that the "then" people
would have gone to war to secure.
If you don't care for any of the luxuries that we
have today, the cars, the electronics, the internet,
the medical care, the stuff that the "then" people
didn't have, earning a living has become so simple
as to be trivial today. spike
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