“To a business, there’s no difference between subsidy and income? Never heard that before, unless businesses are suddenly doing some creative accounting.”
No, there is no difference at all. A subsidy is simply another form of income. What else would it be? There are only 4 categories on the balance sheet in standard accounting: income, expense, liabilities, or assets. Where do you think subsidies should be placed, if not under income?
“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.”
No, this is simply not true at all. You could say that you THINK a business that is making a profit SHOULDN’T get a subsidy, but that is not how it works in reality. Many businesses that make plenty of profits receive subsidies from the government every single day. I work for one myself, and if you consider tax credits a subsidy, I’d wager nearly every poster on this board, including yourself, probably do as well.
“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.”
There’s nothing communistic about factory farming. You haven’t demonstrated that, and just saying it over and over won’t make it true.
“The forerunner of factory farms is the sovkhoz. These were state-owned, but they were organized like industries.”
Their organization was really nothing like factory farms, and simply being a different type of organization does not make them factory farms. I guess you can get away with saying they are a “forerunner”, in that they came before factory farms, and represented a break from traditional family owned farms, but that’s about as far as the similarities go. The most distinctive features of factory farms are automation and highly efficient organization, which were both distinctly lacking in the Soviet farms you are trying to equate them with.
All I’m really getting from this conversation is that you really don’t like factory farms, which is fine. Why not just say that, instead of trying to make some really weak comparison to Communism that is only going to fool a couple rubes?
This all sounds like the Democratic pro-Obamacare arguments, where they all yell “private sector involvement, look, we got that idea from the conservatives in the GOP”.
Subsidized health insurance is not capitalism any more than subsidized farming is, and trying to make any such thing seem like capitalism is being an apologist for the left. The phrase “state capital” also comes from the Communist Manifesto, BTW.