Ken wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2024 8:04 pm
mrbilliam wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2024 6:06 pm
Ken wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2024 3:45 pm
There are efficiencies though.
My time is much more valuable to my employer than in the service of growing, harvesting, and prepping food. Put another way, for about 1 hour of labor at my job I can eat for a week. The amount of effort it would take to raise, hunt, butcher, harvest, process, dry, can, all my food from scratch would involve many more than an average of 1 hour per week. So my time is far more valuable doing other things than subsistence food production.
That doesn't mean I don't have fun gardening and canning, I do. But we don't rely on our garden for nearly all our food. And the extra time I have since I'm not slaving away trying to feed my family through subsistence farming means I have more time to enjoy doing other things like spending time with my wife and kids.
All one has to do is read unfiltered narratives of life on the frontier in the 19th Century (such as Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder) to realize that 19th century subsistence farming was far from a life of milk and honey.
If one inherits a thriving working farm on good soil that has seen 150 years of family improvements on the land, that is one thing. But the vast majority of people are not in that position.
How many of the 12 disciples were subsistence farmers?
That's because you live in the USA, which the petro dollar's value has a high rate of exchange (and falling nearly daily with inflation).
A citizen of Haiti has no such luxury, and their day's labor is about $1.80.
The government at any time can inflate, and force you to engage in their system.
Since you brought up Haiti
Roughly 2/3 of Haitians work in agriculture or subsistence farming
Here in the US, less than 2% of the population is engaged in farming or ranching
I'll leave the audience to decide which type of economy provides greater wealth, development, and opportunities for its population. I don't see many Americans emigrating to Haiti to work in subsistence agriculture.
In America if a person moves a wheelbarrow from point A to B, they make 30x that of a Hatian. The same work is done. Yet the American makes more and can buy more.
The point you are making deviates from my point completely.
The point I'm making is that the petro dollar is the difference. The reason why we are feeling inflation right now is run away money printing and BRICS nations dumping the dollar. The USA has dominated the world with the dollar.
Almost any teaching in the USA teaches 8-10 hours a day, and makes a moderate living. The same teacher who teaches 8-10 hours a day in Haiti, Mexico, India, and Ukraine, barely puts bread on the table.
My point is us Americans are confident in the dollar, and pass it off as our own innovation floating it, when in reality, it's world domination and the petro dollar. It is fast eroding away. $10 for 2 pounds of Strawberries at Costco... $7 lettuce bag at Costco. Our unfunded liabilities are past 200 TRILLION according to the national debt clock. It's a ticking time bomb.
One day America's workers may find it is more worth engaging in Ag for most of their hours, because putting food on the table may level out to what other nations have experienced for many decades now.
Our lifestyles aren't because of our great innovation and exports. Our lifestyles are propped by a dollar that was propped through winning wars. Today war drums are beating again.