"The legacy of Democrats and Republicans approaches: Libertarianism by bankruptcy." – Nick Nuessle
If you have been reading my stuff for a while you know that one of the metrics I follow to understand the factual condition of the U.S. economy is the number of people receiving food assistance from the government. As I continued on this bent I also found that the correlation between food assistance and housing assistance is very, very high. Somewhere over 60% of SNAP recipients (what was formerly called Food Stamps) receive housing assistance (live in subsidized housing, otherwise known as housing projects).
Stay with me... I belong to a "Farmers Co-op", a place where small guys can rent - essentially share - equipment (as well as get a great deal of data... what dates to plant what, how to preserve food, how to make cheese, how to care for livestock...).
Every time that I drive our garbage into town I pass a large public housing project. What struck me about these projects was the number of kitchen gardens behind the structures. "Wow!" I thought. I have lived in New York and Miami and never had I seen a garden anywhere on the grounds of a public housing project (though they had the space). Since these folks have already taken this much initiative... why couldn't they have a barn for dairy animals and a coop for chickens? The "city" of Lebanon, TN has an "inmate's garden" - so they have the equipment - and plenty of land... why not make more space available for growing feed corn... why not bale up the hay that the town cuts along the roads... and make this available to these folks?
Isn't there a shot that by doing so some of these folks will learn how to make money as well as feed themselves? If a nearly 50 year old guy like me can raise as much food as I do part time, why wouldn't these younger families be able to, and benefit from, these efforts?
Well, I pointed this out to the county, the city, and the state... and so far, no go. Could it be that Government, ESPECIALLY the Left, does not WANT these folks to find their way? If they did, and became money-making-tax-paying-contributing-members-of-society, maybe they wouldn't vote for the Left?
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it." -- Benjamin Franklin
There is a better way.
8 comments:
“TN has an "inmate's garden"
I had a criminal justice class a couple of yrs ago and the only thing I remember from that class is that most of the prison farms, manufacturing in prison, etc... Were outlawed because local unions and companies did not like the idea of competing with prison industry and agriculture. So they starting saying things like it is inhumane to force them to work, or that is slavery, etc.... So now we have prisons that could never be called self-sufficient and are a drag on society. Plus working is good for men. It builds character, persistence, judgment and many other virtues. Now these mostly young men get out and have no skills whatsoever and if they have a felony conviction, they will never get a good job. Sad.
WHen I get back I will endeavor to take a photo of the inmate garden - it is truly a work of beauty and a thing to behold.
Why couldn't there just as easily be a "Project's: garden; dairy; poultry & egg biz...?
I will try to post some picks on my page I got some amazing tomatoes plants. Stand four feet tall and have 50 or more tomatoes on each plant. My zucchinis are 18” long and 4-5” inches in diameter. Best yr for me. We used a healthy amount of BS (bull shit) ha-ha in early spring. Gave time to dry out to kill bacteria.
"Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he'll sit in a boat and drink beer."
Jeffers, it all a political game. I think your opening quote catches the basic concept. The left and right will have bankrupted this nation soon and we will once again have to fend for ourselves. I don’t think it’s a all out doomsday, just a recasting of social, political and personal goals and achievements.
From a couple days ago: I have never really thought about the idea that after WW2 most of manufacturing parked on our shores because of the loss of production capacity and so it would only make sense that after 20 or 30 yrs it would return to a closer proximity to the people using the products. It makes much more sense now why the 70’s saw such a malaise in economic activity. Add in that carter was a useful idiot to leftist ideologies and boom it is all so much clearer.
Dextred-
US was the world manufacturing giant before WW2. And the nation that first transformed into a petroleum based economy. After WW2, most of the world was leveled and we were left as the only intact industrial power- and with a nearly brand new national industrial plant that was ready to roll. Plus we were the Saudi Arabia of oil at that period.
Around 90% of US infrastructure has been built since WW2- a period when limitless petroleum supplies did not seem an unreasonable idea. Of course, we now have to use mountains of energy just to maintain all that infrastructure at a functional level.
One big problem of hitting peak oil without prior preparation is that most available energy is committed to urgent present needs with little available to transition to new lower EROI alternative energy systems.
Best,
Marshall
Prisons without gardens??? All of my states facilities have huge gardens except the state halfway houses in town which have relatively smaller gardens. The private HWH don’t have gardens, which is just one of the many reasons their daily cost of incarceration is higher in my opinion. Our food cost is less than $2.00 per person per day and the food isn’t what one would think. I eat it and I could just as easily go out for lunch or bring a sack lunch. The meat is not always the best but the vegetables are fresh from the garden and the bread is top shelf- much better than what you can buy in the store. It can seem a bit other-worldly to eat a baloney sandwich on artisan bread, but that’s the way it is. The only expensive ingredient in good bread is skilled labor.
Prior to WWII most of the worlds production was on our shores. It’s why we were able to ramp up production of war materials so quickly, the skills and capital equipment were already in place all we had to do was retool. We already had the toolmakers for that too. I think WWII just exacerbated an existing condition. I say exacerbate because unbalanced world trade led us into the great depression and started the whole mess to begin with.
There is also, quite a difference between other countries industrializing and us doing our best to run our factories off. The former is normal and to be expected, the latter is a disgrace.
Oops, I guess I should have read the whole thread before posting.
Gentlemen:
After WWII the U.S. literally had over 90% of the productive capacity of the world.
Prior to WWII? A great deal less - but certainly out of proportion to ROW... but during the the Great Depression (the decade prior to WWII) capacity did not mean a whole lot....
Post a Comment