Interesting letter in response to route-to-poverty blog:
I agree with the argument that division of labor is desirable, however, this is not a black or white, or an all or nothing issue as Mr. Downen tries to show. Where does it say that nobody should be self-sufficient and that all our food ought to come from the store? What if some people would be better at doing all kinds of things around a farm than at doing one thing, likely for someone else?
Where I live, most people were self-sufficient 60 years ago. Sure, they were not “rich” but many had a little bit of land, a roof over their heads and more importantly, they had very little or no debt. By most accounts, they lived comfortably, producing a small cash crop to acquire what they could not themselves produce. Today, most of their descendants are heavily dependent on welfare and heavily in debt, i.e. they are (much) “poorer” than their parents and grandparents were. Why? Because they were forced to learn nothing for 12 years (when they should have been learning self-sufficiency skills at home with their parents) and because during those learning years, they were brainwashed into thinking that self-sufficiency led to poverty, that it was an undesirable way to live, and that they needed to “specialize.”
Move forward a couple of generations and instead of having gardens and chickens in their back yards, poor people receive food stamps. Why pick up a shovel and a hoe when you can get welfare? Very few of the farmers, who have plenty of land (and plenty of time on their hands judging by their attendance to bars in the area), produce any of their own food anymore. And because it is almost impossible for a small farmer today to operate in the black, most of them receive entitlements in one way or another (and they send their wives to work while the kids are in daycare and public schools). Some farmers over here, for example, even get paid to not plant rice because of a program that began about 50 years ago with their grand-pa’s generation; the subsidies being transferable from one generation to the next, the grand kids are now pretty much getting paid to not plant nor raise anything.There is no reason for this. Many of these people have the land, the time, and the equipment to become self-sufficient and to be off of entitlements within months, especially in places like South Louisiana where I live. What they lack is the will to get off welfare and the will to learn the many skills needed to be self-sufficient (it is not that easy!). And why should they? They were told to specialize and they did. Now that they can’t make it, they largely blame the “system” and “society” for their failure and they take the money whenever and wherever they can.
Welfare is the route to poverty, not self-sufficiency. What I think we need to realize is that the government has been trying to eradicate self-sufficiency for decades and, unfortunately, with its control of education and with the help of people like Mr. Downen in the media, it largely succeeded in doing so. The government has a good reason for doing this: self-sufficiency is the route to poverty for the State.
