Wealth in the Hands of the State

The always perceptive Sowell wrote about the values of private property and the failed efforts to overcome them. In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler’s Holocaust in the 1940s.

How can that be? Value and wealth are not static. Today is influenced by yesterday as today will influence tomorrow. You can only confiscate the wealth [and income] that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth [or income] — and that future wealth [and income] is less likely to be produced [or earned] when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity. This behavior was considered by the State to be criminal.

As was this: Many farmers, furious at what they perceived as injustice, burned their produce rather than handing it over to the party overseers.

RESA is a plan percolating through Congress that plans to confiscate future wealth. It is a new tax on the retirement plans of Americans. A cap of 450,000 dollars is placed on what can be inherited, the rest goes into short term insurance products--an idea that will reap who knows how much advantage to the retiring congressmen who devised this. We'll see how successful this raid will be.

Cow Wars

People are a source of what the world calls pollution. CO2, methane, and similar byproducts are the normal consequence of mammalian metabolism. But the same is true for animals, particularly farm animals. And there is a surprisingly strong variation in yield of animals across cultures. So food yield from a cow in India is 5% of an American cow, Mexican cows yield 20% of American cows. This means that it takes 20 Indian cows to produce what 1 American cows produces. This also means that the energy requirements to raise cows in India, and the pollution that those cows produce, is vastly higher than in the United States.

So.......if you were a Progressive manager who knows how to improve the world, would you allow the Indians and the Mexicans to raise cattle or should this enterprise be reserved for advanced, efficient Western nations?

Square Man in Round Nature

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences. -Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

The Bolivian government will soon introduce a motion at the United Nations regarding the Rights of Mother Earth. This motion is an extension of a domestic Bolivian law entitled "The Rights of Mother Nature" which guarantees The Earth life, water, clean air and the like. The initiator is President Morales, said to be the first South American President from an indigenous background whose culture history apparently includes the worship of "Packamama", the female embodiment of the earth. Mr. Morales, in 2008, introduced to the U.N. "10 commandments to save the planet;" Number 1 was "End Capitalism".

This is a good example of a problem sweeping the globe: A reasonable insight followed closely by a childish solution. The problem is no better exemplified that the problem facing the American farmer. Without doubt, farms inhabitated and worked by the people who own them out produce all other farms under all other systems. More--and this is crucial--the farms are better cared for and can be passed intact on within the family as working farms over time. Communal farms, farms made corporate, state farms all can mobilize workers and produce larger volumes with less efficiency--but those farms deteriorate and cannot be relied upon in the future. Erosion, water loss, short term chemical treatments all are factors in the decline but the essence seems to be the worker does not own the land, does not feel an attachment and responsibility to it, perhaps has no family inheritance plan for it. The negative--and it is a large negative--is that these farms have limits in efficiency. If one applies the capitalistic notion that bigger production is better, at some point the farm will outgrow the farmer's ability to manage it well and it will decline.

So Henry Ford applied to the farm may not work. More, it may be poison to that land over time.

For some reason this problem is seen by a one-size-fits-all community that either capitalism does not work or, because capitalism works the inefficiencies of gigantic corporate farms must be wrong; that thinking is like saying Newtonian physics doesn't work because it does not explain quantum theory or that quantum is wrong because Newton is right. What it really means is that the world is bigger than our ham-handed rules and more subtle.

Free markets (and freedom) are wonderful concepts based upon our understanding of human nature; these notions predict the success of the family farm but say nothing about the farm's impact on the water table. Our responsibility as thinking adults is to develop theories that will respect both human nature and the nature it lives in.