“The statement “Subsidies keep businesses going that would fail otherwise” is a sweeping generalization.”
But it also is a correct one that has specific examples one can point to. I did not say farming would fail but rather businesses. One is general, the other individual.
“The volume of farm output is due to the nature of the USA’s farmland rather than embracing the communistic methods of industrialization (take note that I’m not going against mechanization here).”
OK, point to one farm in the U.S. and how it has “embraced the communistic methods of industrialization”.
No sweeping generalizations are correct; they are automatically logical fallacies.
Farm subsidy is a very highly controversial matter. How can any conservative be for it? The colonies and USA did without farm subsidy for a number of centuries, and then subsidization started slowly, going back to 1922, rising to the level they are at today.
The Communist Manifesto is specific when it states “(c)ombining agriculture with industrial production”. This has not been the case for most farming practices in the USA until the end of WWII, and the subsidized industrialization thereof has come in with the shift to the left of US politics in general. Thanks to this, food prices are permanently distorted and dependence on both subsidy and industrialization have made farming very precarious.