“So you are countenancing subsidy then as “profit” (which leftists do all the time)?”
Countenancing? No, I am flat out telling you that, to a business, there is really no difference between a subsidy and any other income, in fact, the subsidies may be preferable for reasons I already outlined. This isn’t a value judgement as to whether subsidies are “good”, from a political perspective, it is just how they are viewed from a financial perspective. If you can’t understand that, I recommend taking a basic accounting for business class.
“There’s no difference between US factory farms and USSR collectives other than the output; and frankly, much of the output of US factory farms is not all that healthy to eat.”
Ah, so you cannot find an example of factory farms in the USSR, and so you are trying to call the collectives factory farms now? No, that is not going to fool anyone, I hope. There are a great many differences between the two concepts, but if you aren’t aware of them, I would be happy to list some for you.
“You can’t change the truth with rhetoric.”
I’m not the one who seized on a few misinterpreted words in the Manifesto and tried to use them to rewrite history.
To a business, there’s no difference between subsidy and income? Never heard that before, unless businesses are suddenly doing some creative accounting.
Any business that accepts subsidy for doing something is not making money and admittedly cannot sustain itself in whatever pattern they are maintaining if they had to under a purely capitalist system. That’s like saying the private railroad companies were (and are, in some cases today) making money on commuter rail when they were being subsidized to run those trains (and prior to Amtrak, long distance passenger trains).
Just because we’ve adopted a communistic method of farming without completely abolishing private business doesn’t make it less communistic or more capitalistic, nor does it mean that the origins are in capitalism. Things may even be fascistic in outlook here, what with the close relation between nominally private business and government here.
The forerunner of factory farms is the sovkhoz. These were state-owned, but they were organized like industries. This pattern is scattered all over the world, not just confined to the USA after the USSR’s examples.