Topic: The Rural United States
Mr. Bloody Lemonade !0JqexkOGBc started this discussion 12 minutes ago #136,431
How come in the United States when you go out into the country it’s only white people? I took it as a given until I noticed a bunch of Indians out in the middle of nowhere in Canada and now I’m wondering. Why do white Americans like living in the middle of nowhere?I feel like the endless corn fields are a form of purgatory.
It’s one thing when you realize the corn never ends, it’s another when you realize nobody is even eating most of it. It’s just subsidized by the federal government.
Mr. Bloody Lemonade !0JqexkOGBc (OP) double-posted this 10 minutes ago, 1 minute later[^] [v] #1,448,289
It’s also ironic because most of them lean conservative, but when you think about it, the corn thing, when you think about how that works, they’re taking our money through our taxes and they’re redistributing it which is a form of… can I say the word?
Mr. Bloody Lemonade !0JqexkOGBc (OP) triple-posted this 9 minutes ago, 1 minute later, 3 minutes after the original post[^] [v] #1,448,290
There’s actually an argument to be made that American farmers could make more money if they grew less food. It’s crazy how supply and demand works. Economics, fascinating subject.
Mr. Bloody Lemonade !0JqexkOGBc (OP) quadruple-posted this 5 minutes ago, 3 minutes later, 6 minutes after the original post[^] [v] #1,448,291
Because it’s like, we have heavily industrialized farming. And people would say that oh the free market is efficient blah blah blah. But what you have to understand is we respond to incentives as humans. And each individual farmer can make more money than other farmers by growing more food. So they all reasonably assume as individuals that they should grow more food in order to outcompete the other farmers. So whenever there was some new farming innovation, tractors, whatever, they bought it and utilized it. So now, the whole continental US basically is coated in farm land, horrible for the environment, and we produce lots of food. The issue is, if you have more supply than demand, that lowers the price of food to the point where, if there was more scarcity in food, we would be willing to pay more and farmers would make more money. Which is a funny problem, because we’re destroying the environment and farmers are making less money than they could be making because of free market economics and individuals making rational decisions instead of collective decisions. And does anybody give a crap about what I just said? Nope.