From: Rik van Riel (riel@surriel.com)
Date: Sun Aug 24 2003 - 08:24:17 MDT
On Sat, 23 Aug 2003, Spike wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matt Welland
> > ...Carried to its inevitable consequence all the land is owned by a
> > few very rich people who literally can deny life to the remaining
> > population...
> It would work that way except for the fact that land
> is not a critical resource anymore.
> Farmland? Nah, it's just dirt,
Anybody who claims that agriculture isn't as important any
more as it used to be 50 years ago should try living without
agricultural products for a year. ;)
> and the tax structure of the U.S. is making it harder all
> the time to make money from it.
It's not taxation that's making agriculture unprofitable.
Agriculture has all the properties of a free market that
make a farmer's life hard, and all the properties of a
regulated market that make a farmer's life hard. Companies
like Cargill make an easy profit of agriculture, buying
crop from farmers for near cost price no matter how good
or bad the harvest was.
Of course, you couldn't make agriculture a truly free
market, because then the unprofitable part of the earth's
population would no longer be able to get food!
Imagine the least profitable 0.5% of farmers or eaters
being left behind every year, like you would expect in a
truly free market.
Rik
-- "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan
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