View From The Porch: Why not just collectivize the farms?

Saturday, December 06, 2008

Why not just collectivize the farms?

It would make as much sense as some of the asinine farm policies being excreted from various .gov bureaucracies today, and couldn't hurt productivity any worse.

17 comments:

SpeakerTweaker said...: ASSanine, indeed;)

I couldn't resist.

tweaker; 9:32 AM, December 06, 2008
Buffboy said...: Another federal agency is considering putting the black tailed prairie dog on the endangered species list because there's only 50 million of them left in the west. They could all die off there being that few of them. Maybe because of the Black Plague that they are the #1 carrier of. Maybe we should just go gather them up as pets for the city folk. Idiots.; 9:53 AM, December 06, 2008
Anonymous said...: I hear they tried that in Rhodesia with a modicum of failure.

Gmac; 10:02 AM, December 06, 2008
Anonymous said...: Well, I reckon this is as close as we'll ever get to a Flat Tax.

But how does the EPA deal with all those deer, elk, meese, polarity bears, seals, coyotes, reindtroduced wolves, feral hogs and feral aoudads and all those critters? Even Bambi's gotta fart; I know 'cause a buddy of mine griped about them waking him up at night, while the deer were feeding in his yard. Random farthing throughout the night. Shame he couldn't train them to fart in unison at 6AM.

I probably shouldn't talk about it, though. USF&WS will probably spend tax dollars doing aerial surveys, so they can tax landowners for all those state-owned animals on private property.

And I guess paying a tax will reduce Globular Worming, like windfall taxes on oil companies will produce more oil and reduce the price of transportation fuels.

I've grown accustomed to bureaucratic illogic. It's the escape from rationality that frightens me.

Art; 1:14 PM, December 06, 2008
Tam said...: But farts from vast herds of buffalo are natural and part of Gaia's plan.

Put a fence around 'em and paint 'em like Jersey Cows, and then their farts melt the ice caps.; 1:44 PM, December 06, 2008
Anonymous said...: Just ran across this little tidbit:

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081203/full/news.2008.1275.html

Art; 2:09 PM, December 06, 2008
Anonymous said...: I fail to see how a tax will do anything to reduce the gas.; 3:57 PM, December 06, 2008
Anonymous said...: google "Buffalo Commons" for more Libtard Asshattery concerning gubmint and farming in the Midwest.....

......"The Poppers propose that a significant portion of the region be "deprivatized", and envision an area of native grassland perhaps 10 or 20 million acres (40,000 or 80,000 km²) in size."

These idjits want to take productive land away from individuals and give it back to the bison and prairie dogs, so city folk can go and see what the land looked like before it was put to productive use..... simply because not a lot of people live there

....you think the proles bitch about the cost a cheeseburger now..... take a good portion of cattle county out of the picture.... but then again, you would not expect Liberals to understand supply and demand....; 5:47 PM, December 06, 2008
Somerled said...: In the second 100 days, they will tax belching and farting humans unless they weigh more than 400 pounds and are deemed disabled or are members of Congress. There's far more taxing units that way. Bovines are just a reasonable first step. Incrementalism, you know.; 10:09 PM, December 06, 2008
Vaarok said...: And yet we're producing four times as much milk and double the meat with a third as many cows.

I think Bastiat had some choice words about when the law becomes an instrument of plunder.; 10:17 PM, December 06, 2008
Anonymous said...: So, what's this tax for, emission controls on cattle?

If so, I wanna watch the first time some tree-hugger tries to install a catastrophic converter on yer average milk cow.; 10:51 PM, December 06, 2008
Anonymous said...: This is the kind of idiocy that eventually causes nations to go into anarchy. Let's hope some semblance of common sense prevails on proposed legislation like this... the consequences wouldn't be fun to watch.; 3:08 AM, December 07, 2008
Anonymous said...: This is just another step of many by the "greenies" to wean the common folk from eating meat. Someday when our betters in Washington are the only ones to have access to meat, the supply roads into D.C. should be an interesting place to be. Nothing tastes better than a liberated ribeye.; 8:06 AM, December 07, 2008
Anonymous said...: and in that cheery vein --

The Food Gestapo:

http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/08/swat-team.htm

J the R; 9:08 AM, December 07, 2008
Anonymous said...: jimbo, discounting Indian ownership claims--which are problematic and can conceivably be discounted--what gubmint giveth, gubmint can very legally take away. Homesteading was hardly an unmixed blessing, and the Bonanza era of the golden west is not quite hardly the paean to individualism we'd like it to be. It's OK though: one more round of laws that help the family farm, and they'll all be out of business, making it a bailout, to which the electorate may never say no.; 9:18 AM, December 07, 2008
Anonymous said...: "The state is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

Frederic Bastiat, 1848

Gmac; 12:25 PM, December 07, 2008
On a Wing and a Whim said...: If you haven't heard this one before, here's one of the first lessons to learn:

"It's a poor and stupid farmer that makes money at farming."

What the farmer who said this meant was that for all the attention you think he pays to selecting which strains of crops, how much fertilizer and pesticide to hedge, how much to buy and store, what he thinks the growing season ought to be... a large part of farming is navigating the maze of subsidies to grow to some crops and subsidies not to grow other crops. (Yeah, we do pay farmers _not_ to grow crops. Hoover and FDR loved to try central planning, and it's gotten worse from there.) Beyond that, a large portion more of attention and careful thought is spent with the accountant. Unlike businesses on Wall Street with shareholders who will cheerfully shoot their foot off if it'll make the quarterly balance look better, farmers are motivated to show as little profit as possible - it all has to be shown as counting against a loss, or sunk back into the farm before the government can count it as a profit and heftily tax it.

After all, with those quarter-million dollar combines and huge amounts of valuable land, farming's "obviously" a rich business, on paper, that deserves to be heavily taxed.

Thank God for stubborn farmers who feed us all, refuse to give up their land, and artfully collaborate to dodge ever making a profit.; 8:13 PM, December 07, 2008