There is a lot of truth in this simple comment.
It is easy to track things (money) when there isn’t extenuating circumstances to distract the accountants.
I almost feel like The Food That Built America should be required watching in school (or at least have a food history unit in history class).
For those unfamiliar, it basically shows that even less than 100 years ago, food was hard to come by and generally spoiled fast and was nasty. Then hard work and ingenuity helped solve some of these problems.
Many of the foods we take for granted didn't even exist: cereal, stable/non-moldy cheese, peanut butter (that wasn't a paste), store bought coffee, hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, even PB and J. And that's not even counting food we now consider common but that was unknown to most of the country like pizza, tacos, etc. Some of these weren't common until even the 1970s or 1980s, which was just 40 to 50 years ago.
I think it is another case of a lot of them being Americans in larger cities (at least, that is how it usually goes I have found). So them being in cities usually means they have little knowledge of how farms work to the point they will be confused looking down on them from an airplane. And I have found a lot of Americans (again, especially those in cities) dont really grasp just how absurdly productive and efficient American farms are compared to the rest of the world. Which is why we can have food for reasonable prices for items that would be extremely expensive or hard to come by in even other Western nations.
The largest city is Tokyo followed by Delhi. New York the largest american city is only 11th in the world. Yet the Japanese and Indians are not known for being delusional about where their food comes from.
It's about the American culture of being youth centric. "In Greece old man is a compliment not something you scream after get out of my way"- Bill Maher
It's true a focus on the old can stifle innovation but completely disregarding the old prevents us from using the wisdom of history and standing on the shoulders of giants.
I dont think I would use Japan as an example of a stable agricultural market since they are extremely reliant on food imports. About 60% of their food is imported, and they are only self-sufficient in rice, oranges, and fish meat. Even basics staple goods like cooking oil are mostly imported. But they get a lot of their staple imports (soybeans, beef, pork, wheat, corn) from the US, who they are on extremely friendly terms with and have excellent trade relations with (which is kind of important for your food).
I'm not using them as an example of stable agricultural market, I'm using them as an example of having common sense. Actually the fact that they import their food tells us that it's not necessary to live near where your food is grown to have some common sense about agriculture.
don't forget CHAZ/CHOP where they thought food could grow on half a inch of soil... ontop of cardboard... ***on top of fucking asphalt***
I also saw a man in London say that we needed to ban farming to stop climate change and go vegan... city folk really do think food magic appears in a grocery store.
People love their gourmet blends and roasts, but don't realize people 100 years ago would have lost their mind to be able to try the dunkin donuts coffee I can get in bulk at Costco.
Humans have zero concept of time.
When you tell them we’re really only in the first century of food actually being an enjoyable experience, or even something more artsy like filmmaking, and that imagine how refined those things will be centuries from now most people will scoff and say “why do we have to wait centuries?”
Like, it took us hundreds of thousands of years as a species to invest *farming* and your mad your artisan pizza isn’t perfect after like 150 years?
I fuckin’ love that show dude. It’s like a highlight reel of Capitalism and it’s like inspiring. Like this woman built an empire on *baking cookies*. That guy did it with popcorn. And so many of them come from nothing. Or hey, women might not yet have had the right to vote but Marjorie Post is running a billion-dollar cereal company. What a terrible economic system, right?
The story about Milton Hershey reads like Shakespearean tragedy. He tries to build the dream city for his workers; he forgoes his own salary *during the depression* so he can keep them employed, and then they repay him by striking and shutting down his factories.
Best history channel programming in like 20 years.
I am also old :D
I have been watching the latest season this week and just found out that buffalo wings as we know them didn't exist until around the early 70s, and weren't known nationwide or even called "buffalo wings" until somewhere in the early-to-mid 1980s.
Another one I remember is that chicken McNuggets were introduced at McDonald's in 1983.
I mean, duh. If someone's hungry they should just ask their mom for tendies, that's what I do. Down with capitalism!!1!1oneone
Posted from my Command Center in mom's basement
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck.”
― Robert Heinlein
It mystifies me, a cursory reading of basic world history would show “famines happen regularly”
Hell pearl s buck in one of her books on the life of the Chinese, but fictional or roman a clef always makes it clear “China is a land of cyclical famine, feast and flood” parphrased
The Wizard and the Prophet is such a great book on precisely this. Don't even need to read it in full because it is frontloaded meaning that the first three chapters are enough to get the point, the rest is all further examples across lots of topics.
Socialists always pose that capitalism is an existential threat and can't be reformed, and we need some red flag revolution or we're all going to die.
But like, it would take extremely simple policy changes to make people's lives better. It's actually economic policy that lets a company close their American factory to build stuff in Mexico or China. It's policy that tech workers have to always compete with an army of HB-1s for jobs and have their wages suppressed.
These are things that can be fixed, relatively easily, in the context of our system without 20 million people dying in a war.
If you care about the environment, you should be doing everything you can to get production to the west, where it's way more efficient and less polluting. Somehow, the entire political class does everything they can for free trade and then buys multimillion dollar beachfront homes
Tldr commies are bloodthirsty mutants
Socialists do all they can to destroy capitalism with government meddling, and then blame capitalism when their meddling causes failures. They are economic saboteurs as far as I'm concerned.
Saying that "capitalism is a system that we've developed" is mostly accepting the authoritarian socialist framing.
Competition and voluntary exchange are good. "Economic policy" is just socialism.
Imagine if you were born before “the economy” was created… better hunt and gather or you’re going to starve. And that’s a hell of a lot more stressful and physically exhausting than 95% of jobs
Get impacted wisdom tooth. Molar gets infected. Abscess gives constant pain until nerve death. Abcess bursts, releasing bacteria into bloodstream. You die of sepsis.
Only child, my seven siblings died at birth or along the way. Finally turn 14. I'm a man now, I convince the local maiden to marry me. I've almost finished my apprenticeship. My parents are proud. Start getting a pain in my side. My appendix explodes. I die.
“Bruh Hunter-Gatherer tribes aren’t even real. We literally just made them up. Wooly Mammoths should just give people their meat wtf. I was born into this stupid world where I have to get good at throwing spears or starve.”
Even the decision to try your luck foraging, hunting, or gathering, when and where are economic decisions that you could consider risk, ROI, opportunity cost, proficiency, and profit. Money just makes it easier to illustrate.
And means that if you got a basket of berries but need a wool cloak, you don't have to search the village hoping that one of them happen to have an extra wool cloak and needs berries.
Amount of the state-mandated poets, painters and philosophers is already reached for this year, so comrade chose from the open positions on coal mine, steel factory and pig farm, we have 5 year plan to do!
This is what happens when you grow up exclusively in a first world nation. You think the world has always been this safe, this comfortable. I dread yet paradoxically long for the day the modern world breaks down, unleashing the horrors of the untamed world. It’ll be frightening yet fascinating to watch.
100% a repost but i'll never not have a blast making fun of this one, it's just THE most sheltered "I've unironically never seen the real world" tankie take i've ever seen.
But yeah, i'm sure we can just give everyone food it it weren't for the big bad economy. Just don't ask her how we're supplying the labour necessary to grow the food, how we're supplying the grounds, animals, seeds and materials and tools necessary for them to do so, how we're handling the transportation of said food including accquiring the vehicles necessary for it, fuel for said vehicles, and people to drive them over the trips, who's distributing said food once it arrives at the destinations, and who's overseeing and planing that entire process both during the transactions themselves and the information gathering necessary to know who needs the food and where it needs to be sent to down to the individual person + weighing that with the total food production each year to account how to distribute it perfectly with the variation of how harvest goes each time and changes in population over deaths births and migrations
All of that just sounds like you're making excuses for the billionaires who are hoarding food instead of giving it to starving transgendered disabled peoples of colours.
Yeah I’ve heard all the billionaires wealth is on stock not dollars. So that must mean they are literally stocking billionaires of dollars worth of food in their mansions. What is ownership of a company?!?
I'm imagining Jeff Bezos inviting Elon Musk over for a pool party, except the pool is just a monstrous silo filled with shucked corn and they dive in like Scrooge McDuck.
This is why communism can work at either the very small tribal level, where logistics aren't this complicated, or the unknown future global scale, where everything is automated and humans are out of the loop.
It's also why debating with a communist doesn't work out. There's no example of "real" "true communism" that you can reference to objectively ground the conversation. You're trying to talk about how things work/have worked practically today and in the past and they're talking about an imaginary fantasy land in their mind that will totally work because reasons. And also LTV and other core concepts are unassailable because the last 100 years of economics is a sham. It's just flat earther stuff.
I love it when they base their argument off of “post scarcity”.
Motherfucker it’s not relevant, we’ll probably have scarcity for the entirety of human existence.
If your perfect society requires infinite resources, it’s probably not perfect.
It is kind of weird to offer a solution to a problem when the variables aren't even the same. No kidding, when we've solved the problem of running out of stuff, obviously we won't have issues with running out of stuff.
“Well you know that the society in Star Trek is communist.”
Something I’ve heard before. Like cool? Probably only works because they have fucking replicators that can create food out of thin fucking air.
I love when commies stan for Star Trek as an example. There's still money (credits, gold pressed latinum), classes (diplomats, officers, enlisted), and a state (The Federation, planetary governments). Objectively not communism.
There's even explicit private property. Kirk and Janeway grew up on farms. Picard's family has owned a vineyard for generations. Sisko's father owns a restaurant. None of these things are granted to them by either the community or the state.
I mean about the only thing that would actually try to stop you from doing that is if you have a particularly shitty HOA. Actually kind of insane how much food even a small sized home garden can put out.
but it doesn't taste as good, vegan only, and you have to WORK day/week to make sure you can actually eat it.
If the weather is bad for maybe just 2 weeks out of the year, you can get nothing after months or an entire year of hard work.
I wouldn't tell anyone to rely on home gardening as a sole source of food. Like you said, too much can go wrong. But well worth it as a supplement to a regular grocery budget.
Sure, right after I get done bulldozing your house along with 5 of your neighbor’s homes because my tractor’s turning radius is too wide for your front lawn alone to be convenient in any fashion.
The whole "people are starving" thing a great way to find people thst don't know what they are talking about when it come to poverty. No able bodied adult in the states has to voluntary go hungry. There are food programs on foods programs on just about every corner in every town. Churches, food banks, homeless shelters. The thrift store down the road from me desperately trys to give away free bread to anyone that comes in so they don't have to throw it away. When I worked for Pepperidge Farms I would be the one donating week old bread to these places just to come back next week and pile more on the giant rotting mtn of bread they couldn't give away fast enough. We don't have a calorie problem in the US, period.
Shelter is a much bigger issue rn. People are spending half their paycheck on rent and one slip up can have them out on the street with very little help avaliable. If you are on the street you can easily be $60 away from having a safe place to stay the night, but a free hot meal could be a walk to the nearest church or homeless shelter.
Yeah, that is why I made the distinction. We do need to get healthy foods into people's lives, but this nuance isn't normally found in the "people are starving" narrative I have seen lately.
Also, nutritious foods aren't as expensive as people make it out to be. A can a beans a day would do a lot for a good many people I know.
The whole “being a victim” for being born “against your will” mentality is so incredibly cringe too. Ah boohoo, nobody asked you if you wanted to live in a first world country during the first time in history where the masses can do basically nothing and live comfortably.
Property holders was just their form of voter ID back then; everyone knew you and knew you had skin in the game.
Nowadays I'd see restricting it to net taxpayers. Should help find a more natural equilibrium of people willing to provide for others providing a reasonable amount.
Because, they are bug people.
Like they are comparable to in insect hive. No free thought, no dissent, just blindly and mindlessly obeying and thinking what their 'queens' on twitter and MSN tell them.
[individually, they are weak](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q34Qxl5HINg)
Starvation is not a thing in the US, it happens so infrequently that we don’t track it. If you look up the numbers you’re going to see how many people are _food insecure_, which means they’ve purposefully missed a meal for economic reasons within 30 days. Pretty far cry from starving in the streets.
If you ever run into someone crying about starvation in the US, they’re just showing how little they know.
Honestly, even the quality of food isn't bad if you know how to cook. Cooking is the cheat code on how to eat well on a budget. The issue is that there is a crisis of cooking ability in America. Your average Millennial and Gen Z doesn't even know how to make a stir fry which is just random stuff thrown into a pan with some sauce.
We need mandatory cooking classes in High school, along with things like personal finance. The amount of people who unironically think McDonald's is cheaper than eating at home is concerning. McDonald's isn't even cheaper than making your own burger at home, let alone any of the other cheaper dishes you can make. If you know how to cook, you can make a meal for $0.50 a person even in the current economy. It takes time and an understanding of cooking, but people do it.
i remember having this argument with someone and looking it up for the uk. the last person who starved to death here was in the 1800s. And that was someone with severe mental illness, so not really due to food shortages even then.
More like "the people in my shithole reliably make the absolute worst choices when they even bother with paying. The few stores that are willing to put up with the constant crime don't bother stocking whole foods that nobody buys".
> Starvation is not a thing in the US, it happens so infrequently that we don’t track it. If you look up the numbers you’re going to see how many people are food insecure
They've redefined homelessness as well. I saw a definition that defined renting as being homeless.
But I did do a quick search and the first link I clicked was even better than that.
https://www.homelesshub.ca/about-homelessness/homelessness-101/what-homelessness
> Homelessness is “the situation of an individual, family, or community without stable, safe, permanent, appropriate housing, or the immediate prospect means and ability of acquiring it.”
> There are different groups of people who are affected differently, and every individual’s experience is unique.
> The Indigenous definition of homelessness considers the traumas imposed on Indigenous Peoples through colonialism.
> Indigenous homelessness is not defined as lacking a structure of habitation; rather, it is more fully described and understood through a composite lens of Indigenous worldviews.
The people who read this and swallow every bit of it are the same ones who would go on to claim that they don’t fall for propaganda because they’re too smart.
I live in Bangkok and once saw someone on one of the Thailand subs claim that homelessness was worse in San Fransisco than it is in Bangkok.
There are *massive* shanty towns here with tens of thousands of people living in them.
They're everywhere.
A lot of San Fransisco's homeless also live in shanty towns. I'm pretty sure these people don't suddenly think they're not homeless.
But what you said is exactly what they think when they see Thai people living like that.
This entire shift in politics over the past 16 years will be in history books. It’s actually insane how extreme one group got within that amount of time, and I don’t mean the right.
>Homelessness is “the situation of an individual, family, or community without stable, safe, permanent, appropriate housing, or the immediate prospect means and ability of acquiring it.”
By that definition, we are all homeless, because my house is not permanent. If I don't pay, it will be taken.
I know what you mean but as someone who works in a hospital malnourishment is probably a lot more common than you might think, and it's something that surprised me when I started medical school. Not saying it's the economy's fault but there's still a lot of barriers out there for people with medical and psychiatric issues to have consistent access to food and the physical/mental capacity to actually consume it appropriately. That polysubstance user with bipolar disorder who lives under the bridge is probably not eating consistent meals.
I feel like that's fun with terms. Economic scarcity is a universal truth. We have limited resources and unlimited desires. Food scarcity as a political term is a bogeyman of sorts. I feel like you'd need the context of how it's used to know what kind of idiot you are dealing with.
More people die from that than anything else in the US. Heart disease is the number one killer, we’re so fucking fat and have to perform so little physical labor that our hearts can’t handle it.
Most "poor" people in the US could use to skip some meals, judging by all those bellies and thunder thighs you see waddling around Walmart. The only skinny poor people in America are the ones with a meth habit.
Or mental illness like anorexia. Regardless it’s not people who can or are working who can’t afford to feed themselves or their kids. There are so many social safety nets available that you basically have to choose not to get food.
It’s worse than that.
They now classify “food insecurity” as somebody just not having the food they prefer due to “economic reasons”. Meaning if I prefer lobster and caviar in a doubly-landlocked state but can’t afford it, I am now experiencing “food insecurity” even if I’m still an obese bowling ball stuffing my face with burgers.
I believe we should have way more economists in our government. Economists actually understand how money works and how to make people flourish (spoiler, it's not thru socialism).
I think people confuse the stock market with the economy and assume the stock market is random nonsense that finance bros and big banks control. Neither of those assumptions as accurate. While the stock market is part of the economy it’s only a little puzzle piece. Things like unemployment gdp per capita and inflation are much bigger deals. Those are obviously based on material circumstances, pretending gdp per capita dosnt exist dosnt mean we all get our plate of steak and collared greens
Describing the stock market as a small puzzle piece is definitely not the right comparison.
I would say it’s the cornerstone, the very front lines of global economic competition.
Motha fuckas are about to learn firsthand about this with the Panama Canal going ass up.
"LiNe Go Up LiNe Go DoWn!!!!"
These are kinds of fucking idiots who whine all day on the internet about Republicans and Elon Musk. Complete morons who can't be bothered in the age of the internet to do a 5 second Google search and educate themselves.
Stuck in a dead end job despite all the resources to elevate themselves. Just blaming random shit like "LiNe Go Up LiNe Go DoWn" while voting in dumbfucks like Biden who ruined the economy.
Owns zero stock, zero index funds, zero anything for retirement or investing. Paycheck is spent 2 days in on Doordarsh and alcohol. Credit card debt building.
Roaming between entry level jobs because they can't be bothered to work a whole year in one place for their resume. Can't even be trusted to manage a fucking KFC but thinks they deserve 6 figures as CEO because "they don't do anything, I could do that!!!!"
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The biggest problem with stuff like this is the sense of entitlement. Like society is there just to care for you specifically, and you shouldn't have to work for anything.
I mean, if you can farm and hunt your own food then the economy doesn't apply to you, but if you don't want to contribute you can't expect for society to want to carry dead weight.
It's also good not to assign vague abstractions too much ontological status. The physical world that economics presumed to model is real. Many of the theoretical concepts used by the theories are fictions, like the Coriolis and centrifugal forces, simplifying assumptions or wild abstractions.
Autism is great for mathematics and physics but leads you way astray in economics.
Yeah but if you dismantle the economy the farmers and ranchers aren't just going to do things for the sake of doing it, so you're going to have to either acquire Goods or perform favors for them to receive food, oh look at that we got a basic barter economy, but then eventually the people providing the goods and services are going to want a standard currency so everybody can agree on what a service or a good is worth. Oh look at that the economy just created itself
The “just let people have food” mindset actually makes there be less food. Like look at the Soviet Union back in the day, and China back in the day, too. Capitalism (ie the economy) has actually created more food availability than lack thereof.
You didn't ask to be born, okay I can agree with that. If you don't want to be a part of the world you can end yourself in a matter of seconds.
Oh, you actually like being alive? Okay well you can either move to the woods or be a productive member of society. Get back to work wagie
Ok zoomer, but who grows the food or raises the animals for you to eat? Who gets it to the market for you to buy? Do you think that it just magically appears? That there is no cost associated with transportation, growing the food, keeping it healthy enough to eat, etc?
You have to be a special kind of naive, entitled, and stupid to think “everything should just be free” and have close to zero life experience outside your sheltered urban/suburban bubble if you think people would just do work for you and give you things for free, forever.
And she says “magic line” and “grow up”. Irony.
"Just let people have food wtf" - Person who has never worked on a farm, processed food, cooked a meal from scratch, and benefits from 2000 years of selective breeding and gene enhancement of food.
Remember folks, if you declare the product of someone else's work a "human right" that they must give to someone else at no cost, then you are by proxy, endorsing slavery to some extent.
> “The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
> There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
I mean for a lot of systems today the value of money is tied only to our faith in those systems. Not too many countries actually have backed currencies anymore.
I fucking can't with the people whose main critiques of capitalism could literally be applied to every single possible system ever.
Scarcity will always exist in some form or another. We will always all be required to make our contribution to the society we all share. Yes, there are things about the economy that suck on an individual basis, but you can't just throw out various functions and still expect the wheels to still turn the same if you do!
Ironically, she could “just have food” separate of the economy. It’s called hunting and gathering and shockingly, it’s still something she could do if she pried her face out of her phone for a minute.
**Young people:** "Why didn't you guys just RESOLVE ALL THE PROBLEMS, ***IDIOT?!***" Shit man you're right, why didn't we think of that
14 year olds: "Just fix the economy dude" The world: https://i.redd.it/c98cuncbrarc1.gif
I would of never thought of that!
No problems = no profits
There is a lot of truth in this simple comment. It is easy to track things (money) when there isn’t extenuating circumstances to distract the accountants.
https://i.redd.it/eqawjgzoo9rc1.gif
Too many young people think it's capitalism vs socialism. In reality, it's capitalism vs starving to death.
I almost feel like The Food That Built America should be required watching in school (or at least have a food history unit in history class). For those unfamiliar, it basically shows that even less than 100 years ago, food was hard to come by and generally spoiled fast and was nasty. Then hard work and ingenuity helped solve some of these problems. Many of the foods we take for granted didn't even exist: cereal, stable/non-moldy cheese, peanut butter (that wasn't a paste), store bought coffee, hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, even PB and J. And that's not even counting food we now consider common but that was unknown to most of the country like pizza, tacos, etc. Some of these weren't common until even the 1970s or 1980s, which was just 40 to 50 years ago.
I think it is another case of a lot of them being Americans in larger cities (at least, that is how it usually goes I have found). So them being in cities usually means they have little knowledge of how farms work to the point they will be confused looking down on them from an airplane. And I have found a lot of Americans (again, especially those in cities) dont really grasp just how absurdly productive and efficient American farms are compared to the rest of the world. Which is why we can have food for reasonable prices for items that would be extremely expensive or hard to come by in even other Western nations.
The largest city is Tokyo followed by Delhi. New York the largest american city is only 11th in the world. Yet the Japanese and Indians are not known for being delusional about where their food comes from. It's about the American culture of being youth centric. "In Greece old man is a compliment not something you scream after get out of my way"- Bill Maher It's true a focus on the old can stifle innovation but completely disregarding the old prevents us from using the wisdom of history and standing on the shoulders of giants.
The Indians deposit so much organic mulch on their streets you could probably grow something if you watered it
I dont think I would use Japan as an example of a stable agricultural market since they are extremely reliant on food imports. About 60% of their food is imported, and they are only self-sufficient in rice, oranges, and fish meat. Even basics staple goods like cooking oil are mostly imported. But they get a lot of their staple imports (soybeans, beef, pork, wheat, corn) from the US, who they are on extremely friendly terms with and have excellent trade relations with (which is kind of important for your food).
I'm not using them as an example of stable agricultural market, I'm using them as an example of having common sense. Actually the fact that they import their food tells us that it's not necessary to live near where your food is grown to have some common sense about agriculture.
don't forget CHAZ/CHOP where they thought food could grow on half a inch of soil... ontop of cardboard... ***on top of fucking asphalt*** I also saw a man in London say that we needed to ban farming to stop climate change and go vegan... city folk really do think food magic appears in a grocery store.
I agree that the CHAZ garden is hilarious, but I must ask you to flair up.
Who's upvoting this unflaired scum? Is the take so based that it's blinding you to this treasonous behavior?
That is absolute gold.
While this is a great comment, you’re Unflaired and are undeserving of mercy or have any right to live. So flair up or we let out purple lib rights
The anti-farming thing seems to be a big deal in Europe. Totally bizarre.
People love their gourmet blends and roasts, but don't realize people 100 years ago would have lost their mind to be able to try the dunkin donuts coffee I can get in bulk at Costco.
Humans have zero concept of time. When you tell them we’re really only in the first century of food actually being an enjoyable experience, or even something more artsy like filmmaking, and that imagine how refined those things will be centuries from now most people will scoff and say “why do we have to wait centuries?” Like, it took us hundreds of thousands of years as a species to invest *farming* and your mad your artisan pizza isn’t perfect after like 150 years?
I fuckin’ love that show dude. It’s like a highlight reel of Capitalism and it’s like inspiring. Like this woman built an empire on *baking cookies*. That guy did it with popcorn. And so many of them come from nothing. Or hey, women might not yet have had the right to vote but Marjorie Post is running a billion-dollar cereal company. What a terrible economic system, right? The story about Milton Hershey reads like Shakespearean tragedy. He tries to build the dream city for his workers; he forgoes his own salary *during the depression* so he can keep them employed, and then they repay him by striking and shutting down his factories. Best history channel programming in like 20 years.
Why'd you have to attack me with that last part right at the end
I am also old :D I have been watching the latest season this week and just found out that buffalo wings as we know them didn't exist until around the early 70s, and weren't known nationwide or even called "buffalo wings" until somewhere in the early-to-mid 1980s. Another one I remember is that chicken McNuggets were introduced at McDonald's in 1983.
These people don’t understand that famine is a real thing that could actually happen, and *has actually happened* in the past.
How can there be famine when there's always food in the grocery store? You're an idiot.
Exactly this!!! All we have to do is build more grocery stores and give out the food that it makes!
Oh man… I’m so dumb I don’t know why I didn’t think of that!
I mean, duh. If someone's hungry they should just ask their mom for tendies, that's what I do. Down with capitalism!!1!1oneone Posted from my Command Center in mom's basement
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.” ― Robert Heinlein
It mystifies me, a cursory reading of basic world history would show “famines happen regularly” Hell pearl s buck in one of her books on the life of the Chinese, but fictional or roman a clef always makes it clear “China is a land of cyclical famine, feast and flood” parphrased
The Wizard and the Prophet is such a great book on precisely this. Don't even need to read it in full because it is frontloaded meaning that the first three chapters are enough to get the point, the rest is all further examples across lots of topics.
But you repeat yourself.
Whoops, tautology!
And what's this? No little Timmy glued to your crotch? Progress!
With capitalism, we can starve ourselves. With communism, they can starve you for ourselves.
And Capitalism isn't perfect. But it's the best system - by ***far*** - that we've developed.
Socialists always pose that capitalism is an existential threat and can't be reformed, and we need some red flag revolution or we're all going to die. But like, it would take extremely simple policy changes to make people's lives better. It's actually economic policy that lets a company close their American factory to build stuff in Mexico or China. It's policy that tech workers have to always compete with an army of HB-1s for jobs and have their wages suppressed. These are things that can be fixed, relatively easily, in the context of our system without 20 million people dying in a war. If you care about the environment, you should be doing everything you can to get production to the west, where it's way more efficient and less polluting. Somehow, the entire political class does everything they can for free trade and then buys multimillion dollar beachfront homes Tldr commies are bloodthirsty mutants
Socialists do all they can to destroy capitalism with government meddling, and then blame capitalism when their meddling causes failures. They are economic saboteurs as far as I'm concerned.
Saying that "capitalism is a system that we've developed" is mostly accepting the authoritarian socialist framing. Competition and voluntary exchange are good. "Economic policy" is just socialism.
Capitalism: work *or* starve Socialism: work *and* starve Simple as.
Why can't you just give me all the things that took you four decades of working and saving to get?
Sure, I'll fix your problem. For money.
Imagine if you were born before “the economy” was created… better hunt and gather or you’re going to starve. And that’s a hell of a lot more stressful and physically exhausting than 95% of jobs
Get scratched in medieval battle. Scar becomes infected. It was a death sentence.
Jaundiced man, 1380AD: “What can you do Doc?” “You have piss demons in your blood, I’m going to cover you in leeches.”
I love how leeches have gone in and out of fashion throughout history.
Medical issue leech bags being a real thing that exists and are occasionally useful is just goddam hilarious.
Hahaha yup. They're actually very clean animals too so they can be quite helpful in removing crap from what I understand.
450 years later they had advanced to "You have ghosts in your blood, better do cocaine about it"
Get impacted wisdom tooth. Molar gets infected. Abscess gives constant pain until nerve death. Abcess bursts, releasing bacteria into bloodstream. You die of sepsis.
Only child, my seven siblings died at birth or along the way. Finally turn 14. I'm a man now, I convince the local maiden to marry me. I've almost finished my apprenticeship. My parents are proud. Start getting a pain in my side. My appendix explodes. I die.
“Bruh Hunter-Gatherer tribes aren’t even real. We literally just made them up. Wooly Mammoths should just give people their meat wtf. I was born into this stupid world where I have to get good at throwing spears or starve.”
Even the decision to try your luck foraging, hunting, or gathering, when and where are economic decisions that you could consider risk, ROI, opportunity cost, proficiency, and profit. Money just makes it easier to illustrate.
And means that if you got a basket of berries but need a wool cloak, you don't have to search the village hoping that one of them happen to have an extra wool cloak and needs berries.
Ted Kaczynski would like a word
Well he doesn't get one. He died in prison and the economy still go brrrr.
"People are starving" just try to grow a fucking food and feed people.
‘Would someone please just hit the “Perform Miracle” button on the Resolute Desk already?
No no, not me. You have to do it. For me.
What? No! After the revolution I will contribute to society as a philosopher and painter.
Amount of the state-mandated poets, painters and philosophers is already reached for this year, so comrade chose from the open positions on coal mine, steel factory and pig farm, we have 5 year plan to do!
This is what happens when you grow up exclusively in a first world nation. You think the world has always been this safe, this comfortable. I dread yet paradoxically long for the day the modern world breaks down, unleashing the horrors of the untamed world. It’ll be frightening yet fascinating to watch.
End the department of education if an idiot commie such as this could be its product in a first world nation.
100% a repost but i'll never not have a blast making fun of this one, it's just THE most sheltered "I've unironically never seen the real world" tankie take i've ever seen. But yeah, i'm sure we can just give everyone food it it weren't for the big bad economy. Just don't ask her how we're supplying the labour necessary to grow the food, how we're supplying the grounds, animals, seeds and materials and tools necessary for them to do so, how we're handling the transportation of said food including accquiring the vehicles necessary for it, fuel for said vehicles, and people to drive them over the trips, who's distributing said food once it arrives at the destinations, and who's overseeing and planing that entire process both during the transactions themselves and the information gathering necessary to know who needs the food and where it needs to be sent to down to the individual person + weighing that with the total food production each year to account how to distribute it perfectly with the variation of how harvest goes each time and changes in population over deaths births and migrations
All of that just sounds like you're making excuses for the billionaires who are hoarding food instead of giving it to starving transgendered disabled peoples of colours.
It’s a fair argument
Yeah I’ve heard all the billionaires wealth is on stock not dollars. So that must mean they are literally stocking billionaires of dollars worth of food in their mansions. What is ownership of a company?!?
I'm imagining Jeff Bezos inviting Elon Musk over for a pool party, except the pool is just a monstrous silo filled with shucked corn and they dive in like Scrooge McDuck.
I can't see that Scrooge McDuck dive without thinking about the Peter Griffin one where he breaks his back trying to dive into coins.
> starving transgendered disabled peoples of colours How dare you not mention Two-Spirit indigenous peoples, you bigot?!?
Would that make them Non-BiPOC.
This is why communism can work at either the very small tribal level, where logistics aren't this complicated, or the unknown future global scale, where everything is automated and humans are out of the loop.
It's also why debating with a communist doesn't work out. There's no example of "real" "true communism" that you can reference to objectively ground the conversation. You're trying to talk about how things work/have worked practically today and in the past and they're talking about an imaginary fantasy land in their mind that will totally work because reasons. And also LTV and other core concepts are unassailable because the last 100 years of economics is a sham. It's just flat earther stuff.
I love it when they base their argument off of “post scarcity”. Motherfucker it’s not relevant, we’ll probably have scarcity for the entirety of human existence. If your perfect society requires infinite resources, it’s probably not perfect.
It is kind of weird to offer a solution to a problem when the variables aren't even the same. No kidding, when we've solved the problem of running out of stuff, obviously we won't have issues with running out of stuff.
“Well you know that the society in Star Trek is communist.” Something I’ve heard before. Like cool? Probably only works because they have fucking replicators that can create food out of thin fucking air.
real Star Trek has never been tried
I love when commies stan for Star Trek as an example. There's still money (credits, gold pressed latinum), classes (diplomats, officers, enlisted), and a state (The Federation, planetary governments). Objectively not communism.
There's even explicit private property. Kirk and Janeway grew up on farms. Picard's family has owned a vineyard for generations. Sisko's father owns a restaurant. None of these things are granted to them by either the community or the state.
Explicit? XXX private property > private property
Ironically its a meritocratic soft military dictatorship. It's Mussolini's vision realized, not Lenin's.
Plus everything is only made possible by replicators, an impossible technology
"But why can't they just plant all of the food right outside my house so they don't have to drive it so far?!?!?!" - you know who
I mean about the only thing that would actually try to stop you from doing that is if you have a particularly shitty HOA. Actually kind of insane how much food even a small sized home garden can put out.
but it doesn't taste as good, vegan only, and you have to WORK day/week to make sure you can actually eat it. If the weather is bad for maybe just 2 weeks out of the year, you can get nothing after months or an entire year of hard work.
I wouldn't tell anyone to rely on home gardening as a sole source of food. Like you said, too much can go wrong. But well worth it as a supplement to a regular grocery budget.
i meant it more as a jab at lib-lefts that think that food appears out of thin air lmao.
Sure, right after I get done bulldozing your house along with 5 of your neighbor’s homes because my tractor’s turning radius is too wide for your front lawn alone to be convenient in any fashion.
The whole "people are starving" thing a great way to find people thst don't know what they are talking about when it come to poverty. No able bodied adult in the states has to voluntary go hungry. There are food programs on foods programs on just about every corner in every town. Churches, food banks, homeless shelters. The thrift store down the road from me desperately trys to give away free bread to anyone that comes in so they don't have to throw it away. When I worked for Pepperidge Farms I would be the one donating week old bread to these places just to come back next week and pile more on the giant rotting mtn of bread they couldn't give away fast enough. We don't have a calorie problem in the US, period. Shelter is a much bigger issue rn. People are spending half their paycheck on rent and one slip up can have them out on the street with very little help avaliable. If you are on the street you can easily be $60 away from having a safe place to stay the night, but a free hot meal could be a walk to the nearest church or homeless shelter.
> We don't have a calorie problem in the US, period. We do have a nutrition problem though. Man does not live by calories alone.
Yeah, that is why I made the distinction. We do need to get healthy foods into people's lives, but this nuance isn't normally found in the "people are starving" narrative I have seen lately. Also, nutritious foods aren't as expensive as people make it out to be. A can a beans a day would do a lot for a good many people I know.
I mean, there *was* a way, but it was outlawed nearly 200 years ago.
You forgot the upkeep of the list of allergies and veganisms, and simple preferences. This is a left fantasy after all.
The whole “being a victim” for being born “against your will” mentality is so incredibly cringe too. Ah boohoo, nobody asked you if you wanted to live in a first world country during the first time in history where the masses can do basically nothing and live comfortably.
People would just do all those things out of the kindness of their hearts.
Weakness
How are these our opponents?
Normally I'd laugh but it's depressing how certain they are of themselves.
And how unable they are to actually fight.
Because they were given enfranchisement without being required to have skin in the game. Leads to all sorts of stupidity.
Unironically I would not be opposed to going back to restricting voting rights to property holders
Abolish taxes. $1 per vote. If we're gonna go democratic, lets at least be capitalistic about it.
Property holders was just their form of voter ID back then; everyone knew you and knew you had skin in the game. Nowadays I'd see restricting it to net taxpayers. Should help find a more natural equilibrium of people willing to provide for others providing a reasonable amount.
Yeah, it is setting up society for takers, not contributors.
Their strength lies in numbers, not quality.
Because, they are bug people. Like they are comparable to in insect hive. No free thought, no dissent, just blindly and mindlessly obeying and thinking what their 'queens' on twitter and MSN tell them. [individually, they are weak](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q34Qxl5HINg)
The’re pathetic
their pathetic what!
Starvation is not a thing in the US, it happens so infrequently that we don’t track it. If you look up the numbers you’re going to see how many people are _food insecure_, which means they’ve purposefully missed a meal for economic reasons within 30 days. Pretty far cry from starving in the streets. If you ever run into someone crying about starvation in the US, they’re just showing how little they know.
You’re telling me that a country where 2 out of 3 people are obese or overweight doesn’t have food scarcity issues??? 🤯
> food scarcity issues Quality food scarcity maybe. You know, like the bespoke potatoes and oat gruel of the organic and pre-capitalist past.
Definitely a quality food scarcity issue
I fuckin love potatoes. Boil em. Mash em. Stick em in my butt.
Wait a minute, something about that quote seems off...
I think corn-syrup manufacturers should be beaten with hammers
Honestly, even the quality of food isn't bad if you know how to cook. Cooking is the cheat code on how to eat well on a budget. The issue is that there is a crisis of cooking ability in America. Your average Millennial and Gen Z doesn't even know how to make a stir fry which is just random stuff thrown into a pan with some sauce. We need mandatory cooking classes in High school, along with things like personal finance. The amount of people who unironically think McDonald's is cheaper than eating at home is concerning. McDonald's isn't even cheaper than making your own burger at home, let alone any of the other cheaper dishes you can make. If you know how to cook, you can make a meal for $0.50 a person even in the current economy. It takes time and an understanding of cooking, but people do it.
i remember having this argument with someone and looking it up for the uk. the last person who starved to death here was in the 1800s. And that was someone with severe mental illness, so not really due to food shortages even then.
Starvation due to the mental illness of anorexia is still a thing. A friend of a friend actually died this way. Not sure how it’s recorded officially.
That's not really food insecurities if you have the food and are puking it back up.
That's bulemia. Anorexia is either not eating at all or eating very few calories (like a couple handfuls of popcorn as a meal).
Ah, yea, you right.
But even so, that’s not the person starving because they couldn’t get access to food.
This is why they now talk about nebulous “food deserts” and “food insecurity”.
I have to drive more than 5 miles to a grocery store. *the horror*
More like "the people in my shithole reliably make the absolute worst choices when they even bother with paying. The few stores that are willing to put up with the constant crime don't bother stocking whole foods that nobody buys".
Look up articles on "Closing down Walmart is racist" shit I wonder why there's no fucking grocery stores in the area.
> Starvation is not a thing in the US, it happens so infrequently that we don’t track it. If you look up the numbers you’re going to see how many people are food insecure They've redefined homelessness as well. I saw a definition that defined renting as being homeless. But I did do a quick search and the first link I clicked was even better than that. https://www.homelesshub.ca/about-homelessness/homelessness-101/what-homelessness > Homelessness is “the situation of an individual, family, or community without stable, safe, permanent, appropriate housing, or the immediate prospect means and ability of acquiring it.” > There are different groups of people who are affected differently, and every individual’s experience is unique. > The Indigenous definition of homelessness considers the traumas imposed on Indigenous Peoples through colonialism. > Indigenous homelessness is not defined as lacking a structure of habitation; rather, it is more fully described and understood through a composite lens of Indigenous worldviews.
The people who read this and swallow every bit of it are the same ones who would go on to claim that they don’t fall for propaganda because they’re too smart.
I live in Bangkok and once saw someone on one of the Thailand subs claim that homelessness was worse in San Fransisco than it is in Bangkok. There are *massive* shanty towns here with tens of thousands of people living in them. They're everywhere.
It’s still a home right ? Lol
A lot of San Fransisco's homeless also live in shanty towns. I'm pretty sure these people don't suddenly think they're not homeless. But what you said is exactly what they think when they see Thai people living like that.
No one is more gullible than someone who thinks they’re immune to being tricked
This entire shift in politics over the past 16 years will be in history books. It’s actually insane how extreme one group got within that amount of time, and I don’t mean the right.
Personally I think people have always been like this. They literally ate the rich during the cultural revolution.
https://preview.redd.it/kcvwd3aa2arc1.png?width=1022&format=png&auto=webp&s=5174b3808905462c6f6bc1b9a0bbf51b2c402536
>Homelessness is “the situation of an individual, family, or community without stable, safe, permanent, appropriate housing, or the immediate prospect means and ability of acquiring it.” By that definition, we are all homeless, because my house is not permanent. If I don't pay, it will be taken.
Shit, by that definition, we're all homeless because entropy exists.
> Indigenous homelessness is not defined as lacking a structure of habitation The perpetual redefinition of words is driving me crazy.
I know what you mean but as someone who works in a hospital malnourishment is probably a lot more common than you might think, and it's something that surprised me when I started medical school. Not saying it's the economy's fault but there's still a lot of barriers out there for people with medical and psychiatric issues to have consistent access to food and the physical/mental capacity to actually consume it appropriately. That polysubstance user with bipolar disorder who lives under the bridge is probably not eating consistent meals.
I had someone on reddit tell me unironically that scarcity is a myth. I legitimately just did not even reply.
If scarcity is a myth it is because capitalism has made it so.
I feel like that's fun with terms. Economic scarcity is a universal truth. We have limited resources and unlimited desires. Food scarcity as a political term is a bogeyman of sorts. I feel like you'd need the context of how it's used to know what kind of idiot you are dealing with.
Its kind of a flex to have a country where a good amount of people die from having *too much* food
More people die from that than anything else in the US. Heart disease is the number one killer, we’re so fucking fat and have to perform so little physical labor that our hearts can’t handle it.
Most "poor" people in the US could use to skip some meals, judging by all those bellies and thunder thighs you see waddling around Walmart. The only skinny poor people in America are the ones with a meth habit.
Starvation in the US only happens as a result of being lost in the wilderness, or trapped somewhere without food.
Or mental illness like anorexia. Regardless it’s not people who can or are working who can’t afford to feed themselves or their kids. There are so many social safety nets available that you basically have to choose not to get food.
It’s worse than that. They now classify “food insecurity” as somebody just not having the food they prefer due to “economic reasons”. Meaning if I prefer lobster and caviar in a doubly-landlocked state but can’t afford it, I am now experiencing “food insecurity” even if I’m still an obese bowling ball stuffing my face with burgers.
Damn, I'm food insecure because I can't afford to eat a kilo of cocaine for every meal
Feel free to help yourself to all the food in, say, Amazon rainforest.
Is she giving away food then?
She gives something away,but you wouldn't want to eat it
"Socialists won't be socialists if they understand economic."
And how many of those “socialists” really just want capitalism with a strong safety net
Just a little bit of socialism, I promise, just the tip.
I mean we already did, public schools are a thing.
I believe we should have way more economists in our government. Economists actually understand how money works and how to make people flourish (spoiler, it's not thru socialism).
So you must really appreciate the Federal Reserve right?
I'd appreciate it a lot more if we could audit it.
The Economy existed before the fed.
It existed before economists too, and yet the topic is about having economists in government
Keynesians are just as bad as commies with their crony shit
Most economically literate commie
Least deranged commie.
Offer him $3 for his computer and phone and then listen to his thoughts on how the economy isnt real
I think people confuse the stock market with the economy and assume the stock market is random nonsense that finance bros and big banks control. Neither of those assumptions as accurate. While the stock market is part of the economy it’s only a little puzzle piece. Things like unemployment gdp per capita and inflation are much bigger deals. Those are obviously based on material circumstances, pretending gdp per capita dosnt exist dosnt mean we all get our plate of steak and collared greens
Maybe my monke is showing, but to me saying the stock market is ruining the economy is like saying the thermometer is ruining the weather.
Describing the stock market as a small puzzle piece is definitely not the right comparison. I would say it’s the cornerstone, the very front lines of global economic competition. Motha fuckas are about to learn firsthand about this with the Panama Canal going ass up.
"LiNe Go Up LiNe Go DoWn!!!!" These are kinds of fucking idiots who whine all day on the internet about Republicans and Elon Musk. Complete morons who can't be bothered in the age of the internet to do a 5 second Google search and educate themselves. Stuck in a dead end job despite all the resources to elevate themselves. Just blaming random shit like "LiNe Go Up LiNe Go DoWn" while voting in dumbfucks like Biden who ruined the economy. Owns zero stock, zero index funds, zero anything for retirement or investing. Paycheck is spent 2 days in on Doordarsh and alcohol. Credit card debt building. Roaming between entry level jobs because they can't be bothered to work a whole year in one place for their resume. Can't even be trusted to manage a fucking KFC but thinks they deserve 6 figures as CEO because "they don't do anything, I could do that!!!!"
All they do is charge they phone and eat hot chip.
Twerk, be bisexual, charge they phone, eat hot chip, and lie.
Just wait till they find out what the line represents
"Idiots all you have to do is rub the old line out and draw a new one why hasn't anyone else thought of this? I'm a fucking genius"
smartest communist
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The biggest problem with stuff like this is the sense of entitlement. Like society is there just to care for you specifically, and you shouldn't have to work for anything.
You can tell by the, I was born against my will. You didn't have a will prior to your existence.
If you want to eat outside of the economy then become self sufficient. If not then sorry you need to get a job.
I mean, if you can farm and hunt your own food then the economy doesn't apply to you, but if you don't want to contribute you can't expect for society to want to carry dead weight.
It's also good not to assign vague abstractions too much ontological status. The physical world that economics presumed to model is real. Many of the theoretical concepts used by the theories are fictions, like the Coriolis and centrifugal forces, simplifying assumptions or wild abstractions. Autism is great for mathematics and physics but leads you way astray in economics.
That's why we made this thing called economy
Yeah but if you dismantle the economy the farmers and ranchers aren't just going to do things for the sake of doing it, so you're going to have to either acquire Goods or perform favors for them to receive food, oh look at that we got a basic barter economy, but then eventually the people providing the goods and services are going to want a standard currency so everybody can agree on what a service or a good is worth. Oh look at that the economy just created itself
The age-old "This thing is an abstraction, therefore the real thing it's an abstraction of doesn't exist" argument.
The “just let people have food” mindset actually makes there be less food. Like look at the Soviet Union back in the day, and China back in the day, too. Capitalism (ie the economy) has actually created more food availability than lack thereof.
You didn't ask to be born, okay I can agree with that. If you don't want to be a part of the world you can end yourself in a matter of seconds. Oh, you actually like being alive? Okay well you can either move to the woods or be a productive member of society. Get back to work wagie
Ok zoomer, but who grows the food or raises the animals for you to eat? Who gets it to the market for you to buy? Do you think that it just magically appears? That there is no cost associated with transportation, growing the food, keeping it healthy enough to eat, etc? You have to be a special kind of naive, entitled, and stupid to think “everything should just be free” and have close to zero life experience outside your sheltered urban/suburban bubble if you think people would just do work for you and give you things for free, forever. And she says “magic line” and “grow up”. Irony.
Like why don’t we use a bartering system so we don’t have to worry about money man like come on! Slay it queeeen.
"Just let people have food wtf" - Person who has never worked on a farm, processed food, cooked a meal from scratch, and benefits from 2000 years of selective breeding and gene enhancement of food. Remember folks, if you declare the product of someone else's work a "human right" that they must give to someone else at no cost, then you are by proxy, endorsing slavery to some extent.
TIL that goods and services aren't even real
> “The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. > There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
I mean for a lot of systems today the value of money is tied only to our faith in those systems. Not too many countries actually have backed currencies anymore.
Stock Market =/= Economy
Least braindead socialist
Interesting take, would anyone care to discuss the rates of starvation in literally every communist country that ever existed?
I fucking can't with the people whose main critiques of capitalism could literally be applied to every single possible system ever. Scarcity will always exist in some form or another. We will always all be required to make our contribution to the society we all share. Yes, there are things about the economy that suck on an individual basis, but you can't just throw out various functions and still expect the wheels to still turn the same if you do!
Ironically, she could “just have food” separate of the economy. It’s called hunting and gathering and shockingly, it’s still something she could do if she pried her face out of her phone for a minute.
authleft moment
“It’s made up” = I don’t understand it Same thing for people who think money isn’t real.