Posted on 12/01/2003 2:17:55 AM PST by sarcasm
When the government takes their freakin' jackboot off of our necks, lets us keep most of our income, stops brainwashing the kids in the government gulags, gives parental rights back to fathers and stops the non-stop propaganda saying that white people and especially white men are bad.
In other words, when this government finally stops doing what it is currently doing and gets back to basic functions like protecting our borders and enforcing rule of law. You know, those tasks they have currently pretty much given up on in favor of the whole socialist agenda. That's when, and not a moment before then.
Memo to self: Do not keep more than six threads open at a time.
Something like 80% of the people who farm for a living would agree with you.
It is the part-time and hobby farmer who is anxious for his annual stipend from the government for not growing whatever it is that he had no intention of growing in the first place.
Unfortunately, in the referenda that inform many farm policies, it is "one farmer-one vote". An Oklahoma wheat farmer working 1200 acres has no more say about grain programs than an Ohio gentleman farmer raising 12 A of oats for his horses.
Add in the agribusiness lobbyists in pursuit of pork and the farm state legislators in pursuit of perks...and you have the formula for a programmatic disaster.
Wow, all of that caused by a Wal-Mart moving in 60 MILES AWAY!
Who know they were so powerful.
I certainly am getting scared. Think I'll get a bunch of old codgers [like me] and start a guerrilla action against them.
They're only six miles from here!
That is one suggestion that has real merit!
I'm one of the guilty ones that sold out a few years ago from this same area. I, too, lived in Nuckolls county, just outside Lawrence, on my granddaddy's old homestead that he proved right after the civil war. I know the region well.
The gubmint taxed me off my land. When wheat and corn still sells for essentially the same price it did back in the 1930s but the cost of everything else is at least ten times higher, it's an adversarial economic situation.
Government subsidies just made the situation worse, because the big boys were the only ones to get any relief from it, and those taxes just kept going up. To top it all off, the government stepped in during the war years and froze the price of hogs at $0.06 per pound. It was impossible to raise porkers at that price even if you had free feed.
It would have been difficult enough to maintain the agricultural lifestyle just battling the natural economic realities, but when the knot-headed government made and keeps making the most unreasonable tax demands and crop regulations, it's time to run for your life.
The students said they thought there was a plot among the adults in town to keep young people out and maintain Superior as a retirement community. The adults say just the opposite: They are desperate for new people, especially the young.If they are like most people in similar circumstances, they are desperate for younger people just like them. Hence the catch.
-Eric
I called around and couldn't get any codgers to volunteer for a raid. Think I'll wait untill next year.
There's a new fish finder, and some ammo I want to get anyway. ;)
My guess would be that the vast majority of FReepers would favor ending farm subsidies -- including a majority of FReepers who are themselves farmers.
After running an Alabama pecan orchard for eight years, I no longer farm. But my sympathies lie with those who do.
Like everything else the federal government has involved itself in -- healthcare, indian affairs, welfare programs, etc. -- the individual agriculturalists and their markets have gotten totally screwed.
"You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country."--(William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" Speech July 9, 1896, at the Democratic National Convention, Chicago)
Well, times certainly seem to have changed!
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