Few 20th-century thinkers have had such a lasting and profound influence as Karl Polanyi. “Some books refuse to go away — they get shot out of the water but surface again and remain afloat,” Charles Kindleberger, the economic historian, remarked about his masterpiece The Great Transformation. This remains truer than ever, 60 years since Polanyi’s death, and 80 since the book’s publication. As societies continue to wrestle the bounds of capitalism, the book arguably remains the sharpest critique of market liberalism ever written.
Born in Austria in 1886, Polanyi was raised in Budapest in a prosperous German-speaking bourgeois family. Even though the latter was nominally Jewish, Polanyi converted to Christianity — or, more precisely, to Christian socialism — early on. Following the end of the First World War, he moved to “red” Vienna, where he became an editor of the prestigious economics journal Der Österreichische Volkswirt (Austrian Economist), and an early critic of the neoliberal, or “Austrian”, school of economics, represented among others by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. After the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933, Polanyi’s views became socially ostracised, and he moved to England, and then to the United States in 1940. He wrote The Great Transformation while teaching at Bennington College in Vermont.
Polanyi set out to explain the massive economic and social transformations that he had witnessed during his lifetime: the end of the century of “relative peace” in Europe, from 1815 to 1914, and the subsequent descent into economic turmoil, fascism and war, which was still ongoing at the time of the book’s publication. He traced these upheavals back to a single, overarching cause: the rise of market liberalism in the early 19th century — the belief that society can and should be organised through self-regulating markets. For him, this represented nothing less than an ontological break with much of human history. Prior to the 19th century, he insisted, the human economy had always been “embedded” in society: it was subordinated to local politics, customs, religion and social relations. Land and labour, in particular, were not treated as commodities but as parts of an articulate whole — of life itself.
By postulating the allegedly “self-regulating” nature of markets, economic liberalism turned this logic on its head. Not only did it artificially separate “society” and “the economy” into two separate spheres, it demanded the subordination of society, of life itself, to the logic of the self-regulating market. For Polanyi, this “means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system”.
Polanyi’s first objection to this was moral, and was inextricably tied to his Christian beliefs: it is simply wrong to treat the organic elements of life — human beings, land, nature — as commodities, goods produced for sale. Such a concept violates the “sacred” order that has governed societies for much of human history. “To include [labour and land] in the market mechanism means to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market,” Polanyi argued. And in this sense, he was what we may call a “conservative socialist”: he opposed market liberalism not just on distributional grounds but also because it “attacked the fabric of society”, breaking down social and communitarian bonds, and breeding atomised and alienated individuals.
This relates to the second level of Polanyi’s argument, which was more practical: market liberals might have wanted to dis-embed the economy from society and create a fully self-regulating market, and went to great lengths to achieve this, but their project was always bound to fail. It simply cannot exist. As he writes in the opening of the book: “Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark Utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.”
Human beings, Polanyi argued, will always react against the devastating social consequences of unrestrained markets — and struggle to re-subordinate the economy, to some degree, to their material, social and even “spiritual” wants. This is the source of his argument about the “double movement”: because attempts to disembed the economy from society inevitably invite resistance, market societies are constantly shaped by two opposing movements. There’s the movement to constantly expand the scope of the market, and the countermovement resisting this expansion, especially insofar as “fictitious” commodities are concerned, primarily labour and land.
This leads on to the third level of Polanyi’s critique, which dismantled the orthodox liberal account of the rise of capitalism. Precisely because there is nothing natural about the market economy, which actually represents an attempt to disrupt the natural order of societies, it can never emerge spontaneously — nor can it self-regulate. On the contrary, the state was needed to enforce changes in social structure and human thinking that allowed for a competitive capitalist economy. The proclaimed separation of state and market is an illusion, Polanyi said. Markets and trading in commodities are a part of all human societies, but in order to create a “market society”, these commodities have to be subject to a larger, coherent system of market relations. This is something that can only be accomplished through state coercion and regulation.
“There was nothing natural about laissez-faire; free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course,” he wrote. “Laissez-faire was planned… [it] was enforced by the state.” Polanyi wasn’t just referring to the “enormous increase in continuous, centrally organised and controlled interventionism” needed to enforce the logic of the market, but also to the need for state repression to counter the inevitable reaction — the countermovement — of those bearing the social and economic costs of disembedding: families, workers, farmers and small businesses exposed to the disruptive and destructive forces of the market.
In other words, the support of state structures — to protect private property, to police the dealings of different members of the ruling class with each other, to provide services that are essential for the reproduction of the system — was the political prerequisite for the development of capitalism. And yet, paradoxically, market liberalism’s need for the state to function is also the main reason for its enduring intellectual appeal. Precisely because pure self-regulating markets cannot exist, its advocates, such as contemporary libertarians, can always claim that capitalism’s failures are due to the lack of truly “free” markets.
And yet, even Polanyi’s ideological enemies, neoliberals such as Hayek and Mises, were perfectly aware that the self-regulating market is a myth. As Quinn Slobodian has written, their aim was “not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy”, by using the state to artificially separate the “economic” from the “political”. In this sense, market liberalism can be considered a political project as much as an economic one: a response to the entrance of the masses into the political arena from the late-19th century, as a result of the extension of universal suffrage — a development most militant liberals of the time were vehemently opposed to.
This project wasn’t just pursued at the national level but at the international one too, through the creation of the gold standard, which was an attempt to extend the logic of the allegedly self-regulating (but actually enforced) market to the economic relations between countries. This was an early globalist attempt to marginalise the role of nation-states — and their citizens — in the management of economic affairs. The gold standard effectively subordinated national economic policies to the inflexible rules of the global economy. But it also shielded the economic realm from the democratic pressures building as suffrage spread across the West, while at the same time offering a very effective tool to discipline labour.
However, the gold standard imposed such massive costs on societies, in the form of destructive deflationary policies, that the tensions created by the system eventually imploded. First, we saw the collapse of the international order in 1914, and then again following the Great Depression. The latter prompted the biggest anti-liberal countermovement the world had ever seen, as nations sought different ways to protect themselves from the destructive effects of the global “self-regulating” economy — including by embracing fascism. In this sense, according to Polanyi, the Second World War was a direct consequence of the attempt to organise the global economy on the basis of market liberalism.
The war was still ongoing when the book was published. Yet Polanyi remained an optimist. He believed that the violent transformations that had shook the world over the previous century had set the stage for the ultimate “great transformation”: the subordination of national economies as well as the global economy to democratic politics. He called such a system “socialism” — but his understanding of the term differed significantly from mainstream Marxism. Polanyi’s socialism wasn’t just the construction of a more just society, but the “the continuation of that endeavour to make society a distinctively human relationship of persons which in Western Europe was always associated with Christian traditions”. In this sense, he also emphasised the “territorial character of sovereignty” — the nation-state as the precondition for the exercise of democratic politics.
A bigger role for government needn’t necessarily take an oppressive form, according to Polanyi. On the contrary, he argued that freeing human beings from the tyrannical logic of the market was a precondition for “achiev[ing] freedom not only for the few, but for all” — freedom for people to start living rather than just surviving. The welfare-capitalist and social-democratic regimes implemented after the Second World War, though far from perfect, represented a first step in this direction. They partially de-commodified labour and social life, and created an international system that facilitated high levels of international trade while buffering societies from the pressures of the global economy. In Polanyian terms, the economy was, to some degree, “re-embedded” in society.
But this ended up engendering yet another countermovement — this time from the capitalist class. Beginning in the Eighties, the doctrine of market liberalism was resurrected in the form of neoliberalism, hyper-globalisation and a renewed attack on the institutions of national democracy — all done with the active support of the state. Meanwhile, in Europe, an even more extreme version of the gold standard was created: the euro. National economies were once again placed in a straightjacket. Just as under previous iterations of market liberalism, this old-new order impoverished workers and laid waste to our industrial capacity, public services, vital infrastructures and local communities. Polanyi would have argued that a backlash was inevitable — and indeed it came, beginning in the late 2010s, though the populist uprisings of the past decade also failed to replace the system with a new order.
The result is that, just as a century ago, the intrinsic contradictions of the “international liberal order” are once again leading to a breakdown of the system, and to a dramatic intensification of international tensions. If Polanyi were alive today, he probably wouldn’t be as optimistic as he was when he published his book. We are definitely in the midst of yet another “great transformation” — but the future it heralds couldn’t be farther from the democratic, co-operative international order he envisioned.
Thomas Fazi is an UnHerd columnist and translator. His latest book is The Covid Consensus, co-authored with Toby Green.
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SubscribeJacob Szela served the Russian cause, and his children and great-grandchildren were to pay for it. And there is a reason why jacqueries fail. They are manifestations of anger without prospects or plans, that regularly are outmanoeuvred or simply out-hammered by more intelligent brutes.
European elites seem so adept at suicide, whether with free trade pacts, no defense spending, endless subsidized immigration. Many farmers don’t want to go down with the ship.
Personally I want cheap food
Does English fruit and veg pick itself? Of course not. It is harvested by illegal immigrants controlled by criminals.
The rationale for subsidising European farmers is to provide some level of food security for a time when the ability to import food is limited by war.
The other question to ask is who is planning to own and control the produce from Ukraine’s fertile land, once the war ends and most Ukrainians are refugees in other European countries working to keep down pay rates. My assumption is that it is US corporations and funds.
It is just a pity that the discussions in the comments do not touch on the bigger picture.
If you want to be healthy for the whole of your life, one thing that helps is to have food that comes from healthy soils, worked on by healthy farmers using healthy production (and transformation) models.
Even in the best farms in the uk or Europe for that matter (unless they are organic small holdings who struggle under the regulation that does not apply to them) do not produce the healthy and nourishing food you think they do. This is because the way they farm is mostly directed by regulations and subsidies that eventually benefit the large business that sell them chemicals of all sorts and an industry that transforms many of their products through too much processing (loss of nutrition and health of the food).
People buy vitamins, go to the gym, and spend on all sorts of things to look after their health. That money can be spend of food that is nutritious, of which you will eat much less and be healthier for….
It is indeed a matter or choice but also our choice now will also determine what happens to the next generations..
You cannot separate yourself form the environment you live in, you are part of it. How you treat it will affect you and others and of course farming plays an important role in this environment. And yes this may all sound romantic but it is also becoming more and more accepted as being reality by those who study biology and the living. (System biology)
The farmers struggle can be reduced to the latest subvention change (removal) but is likely a sign of something much deeper. Farming in the ‘modern’ chemical farming environment is rarely compatible with healthy farmers/farms. It is best to see the protests as symptoms of this. A quick fix will not lead to improvement of health. For the health of farms and their produce to improve, one way or another, we will need to create the right environment (regulation, and commerce). This starts by stopping to listen to the messages of doom from the industry (saying we need ‘modern (=chemical) farming to feed the world) , an industry that has a lot to loose here…
Give the public bread and games and they are quiet: this is now sugary/fat food/drinks and take away food, and MSM, tictoc and other addictive social media…..
Those blocking roads with their £200K John Deere tractors are NOT peasants as you note. They are the beneficiaries of decades of policy designed to force peasants off the land and pushing money into the hands of an increasingly smaller group of landowners and tenant farmers. The threats to the livelihoods of these farmers are not down to envrironmental legislation but multiple. Environmentalism and proper agriculture go hand in hand.
“CUNTRASTRUMA!!”. I want to see this on protesters’ banners.
One of the perils of supporting a govt that can give you anything is that you have also created a govt that can take everything away.
Oh I’m stealing that!
Fascinating article!
Germany’s home secretary, Nancy Faeser, has pinned the blame on far-Right coup-makers, accusing them of seducing the unsuspecting subalterns.
Nancy Faeser is Germany’s worst politician. There’s no nicer way of putting it. Blaming everything on the far right is just her very unimaginative way of trying to distract from her own dismal performance and the unsustainability of her and her party’s politics.
Anil back to his Marxist polemics with an occasional populist and ignorant twist. Liberal use of “Far Right” etc tropes again and am sure an equally generous consulting of Oxbridge radicals- CJ Hill, EPT, EJH et al in framing the issue.
A theme which needed rather a genuine factual analysis maybe from Philip Pilkington or one of UH’s economics stable familiar with the actual working of the corporate sector and it’s alignments with Big Agriculture against the small farmers of Europe.
India ” worlds poorest”?! Come on, even the most envious Col Blimp would now acknowledge that the Indian economy is poised for being in GDP terms the world’s 3rd important.
The problems of Indian farmers ( mostly rich and pampered)are entirely created by Anil’s Marxist pals acting with generous funding from Soros et al to stir dissent and demand even greater protectionism than what Congress Socialism brought in for 70 years, and which due to India’s Left lobby, even the present government has had to back track on.
UH- can you not afford better commentariat on India at least than this icon of disinformation?!
GDP per capita? Even that’s not reliable because it is unevenly spread.
Somalia, Malawi is a false equivalence and shows Anil to be everything but an economist( unless Marxist “economics’ is your thing of course)
I see your point but think that Mr. Anil retrained his polemical tendencies in this article, until resorting to a “soft manifesto” tone at the end. His points are reliably one-sided, but for me several of them landed in this Apology for the Revolting Peasants.
A bit hilarious that the ultra-intellectual and urbane Anil, in familiar Ivory Tower fashion, pretends or perhaps sincerely imagines that he is in solidarity with past, present, and prospective peasant mobs. Does he suppose they will never threaten him with updated versions of pitchforks and knives, because he talks a good People’s game?
I think you will have to supply some of what’s lacking here with respect to India, (correction)
Mr.Ms. Gupta. In my outsider’s opinion: You are doing that quite well, but try not to get too upset or to assume more than a general-Western-reader’s knowledge of the so-called subcontinent, as that will make your worthwhile and astute comments less effective overall.I’d be happy to see you write an occasional column of your own here. Perhaps the cushioned elites at UnHerd could permit those of us in the BTL peasantry (so to speak) to nominate a subscriber-columnist of the week?
Thank you AJ. I would of course love to enlighten readers more on present Indian contexts. It’s ironic that Anil’s asides came on a day when some billionaire farmers who don’t pay income tax, demand waivers of all bank loan debts, claim a hefty defined pension benefit etc etc launched an ” agitation” to push up food prices in North India aside from causing major public infrastructure disruption.
I entirely agree that there is a lot of misconception about not just India, but many other parts of the erstwhile colonial dominions of the West.
Much of this is due to lazy journalism and a desire to play tropes in analyses.
Even for the West, I would have liked to understand what subsidies the EU farmers were getting before- whose withdrawal is leading to the present chaos.
In India, the “farm lobby” never pays taxes of any kinds but avails of free subsidies of a voluminous nature.
Its always better to have more nuanced articles from actual economists or on the spot reporting journalists than “ivory tower” columnists like Anil who usually push an obvious agenda in their polemics.
Thank you for the response, which I’ll take as your first occasional column, more in seriousness than in jest.
A someone with a meager understanding of what’s called “the dismal science”, I tend to prefer on-the-ground journalism to economic analyses, and think there are valid observations that exist outside of any data, or socioeconomic matrix of investigation. However, a Marxist-infused light-polemic should probably get into the facts and numbers of the matter a little more than Anil does–not that his selective conclusions would please most commenters here!
If I may ask: Do you remain “on the ground” of India or have you moved to somewhere in the far-flung cultural zone called the West?
I agree with you on the ” dismal science” – but it’s always good to sift through jargon and understand their arguments.
My peeve with most on- site journalists is that when they report on corporate media, it’s usually tailored to suit the interests of their financiers. Substack is a good way of reading more genuine analysis – at least you know the intellectual bias of the author before you delve in.
I am very much an Indian realist “on the ground”! Hardly can afford either the time or money to travel Westward. Though having studied in the UK, I retain an interest in its conditions. Also because we have a shared recent history, and as I am currently working on a book on the last days of the Raj, I do find a close cultural identification ( however strange that may sound) Probably one of the last remnants of that odd tribe of ” Macaulay’s orphans”!
Fascinating, thanks for the follow-up and please do inform us when your book is released. Being monolingual at the level of any real fluency, I hope it is written in or translated into English, but that it finds readers and success in any case. As a Canada-born US-resident dual citizen, a recovering Anglophile with an enduring interest in British lit and wit, I have a certain combined closeness and remoteness from British ways myself. You know far more about the UK than I do first hand–since I’ve not even visited yet! My hippie parents gave me a Hindu first name to go with my Scottish surname (it’s been AJ since age 14) but my first visit to India is also, at best, still ahead of me.
I’ve read some of T.B. Macaulay’s work–as an undergraduate I enjoyed his take on Joseph Addison–but was unaware of the term “Macaulayism” before a quick search just now.
I’ve been investigating a few Substacks too. Cheers.
The quiescent age of worker passivity has been bought with exponentially growing debt in the West funding industrialisation in the East. The loss of Western jobs and stagnating Western earnings caused by offshoring production has been mitigated by higher living standards from cheap imports bought using cheap credit funding the offshoring of production to cheaper regions. Meanwhile in the East the industrial boom soaked up peasants and gave them higher incomes.
As the debt creation went into overdrive, the East was able to do only one thing with the money surplus: send it back to the West as debt to fund even more consumption of the East’s production. Like any over supply, this reduced the value of debt: interest rates trended lower for over 40 years until they went to near zero. It was sustained falling interest rates that allowed the Western peasants and labourers to support exponentially growing debt.
In 2008 the numerical limit of all this was reached and Western debt markets were overcooked. The limit was massaged a bit more through negative interest rates engineered by quantitative easing but even this couldn’t support the peasants and labourers taking on more debt. Today Western governments are taking on vast debt to mask stagnating peasant and labourer incomes and to keep the West-East debt-consumption-production cycle pumping.
Yet that cycle has stuttered and has been stuttering since 2008. This ultimately is the cause of now rising peasant and labourer unrest in the West and East. The peasants and labourers in the East and West are now both experiencing falling living standards. Their quiescence has reached a limit.
Fear not global elite, if you can’t buy quiescence you can always use fear and repression. Real or imagined external threats and instability, fear of the alternative, naturally force people to be more sanguine about their personal circumstances. So long as it looks worse everywhere else, then the peasants and labourers will learn to accept their new, poorer circumstances. I know I’d be hard pushed to think of somewhere better to escape to – the whole world looks mad, so here I am quiescing to my own more straitened circumstances. Two nil to the globalists.
This is a good analysis. Western financial elites connived in Chinese mercantilism because it made them (us?) immeasurably richer at the expense of the blue collar classes. Now we’re beginning to experience the consequences.
Surely the Western consumers who filled their homes with cheap chinese goods connived too?
I use Amazon Prime a lot. It’s so convenient! So easy! Competitive prices (taking into account the time and money spent driving around as we used to, to different shops to compare and contrast their offers). I order from the comfort of the sofa whatever I suddenly realise I need: a pack of AA batteries, a realm of A4 paper, a salt mill, a new washing machine. Even as I do so I understand I am contributing to the downfall of a free market economy and one of these days I/we will wake up to the knowledge that Amazon is now the monopoly supplier and prices will rise and we will have no choice. A captive audience.
Exactly.
There is much in that, but again we have a simplistic demonology of the “global elites” etc. The world as a whole has undoubtedly become much richer because of globalisation. The evidence is overwhelming. But has this produced losers? Well yes it has. But why exactly are westerners just by virtue of expectation and history entitled to an ever increasing standard of living when productivity is often so much lower than in Asian societies? And eventually Africa will get out of its torpor to. In any case you can’t magic this fact away. Good times can end; we are under much greater levels of competition – and not only from China. This was not the case in the relatively prosperous post 1945 period..
I’m thinking back to the circa 1970s to circa early 2000s. Words on the radio. Over and over,again and again. The USA is putting pressure on this country,that country,another country to sign a Free Trade agreement with them. The other country was reluctant.
The BBC would have Economists explain how great Free Trade was because two countries could trade with each other without those price barriers,those tariffs that made whatever commodity was being imported too expensive to be in reach of most people of that country thus stifling demand. Stifling demand was a BAD THING. In vain would a government ministry from whichever country explain their fears that if they signed up the USA might export to their country some item or other of inferior quality but cheap that would put their own craftsmen out of business and work but those same craftsmen would not have the ability to send their goods to the USA even if in theory they could,so maybe Free Trade wouldnt be a good deal for them. This idea was mocked and ridiculed (but often subtly) as being,yes,a peasant mindset from past centuries not fitting for our modern contemporary liberal,open minded,wide ranging,forward thinking World Society. Get with the Program,Peasants. The USA usually got its way back then,if they didn’t they sent in the Marines.
And so it proved that cheap cheapjack USA goods destroyed national economies. And people’s ways of life.
Free Trade only really works one way a USA have now found out as China beat them at their own game. Now they don’t love Free Trade so much. Just like they don’t welcome the huddled masses much now. It’s ironic I think that the EU has put in place numerous stringent laws to uphold high food standards and animal welfare which many farmers are proud that they comply with and produce high quality food,yet they have had the rug pulled from under them by this agreement to import food from countries with no such laws and protections. Of course Consumers will loyally support the farmers and buy the higher quality,higher priced option in the supermarket,we are all confident of that – aren’t we?
You seem to think that trade is a zero sum game. It isn’t. Both parties benefit.
I’m sure many readers have been to the US and some to Latin America. I’ve done both and found no problem at all with food safety. What’s the problem with letting people choose ? If they prefer higher quality European stuff, they can pay more for it.
I’ve also eaten steak in Singapore (an island with no cows) which cost half the price it did in the UK at the time.
EU protectionist agriculture is a disaster not only for EU residents who pay far too much for food, but also for agriculture in developing countries who get EU surplus produce dumped on them.
Both parties benefit … if they’re playing the game by the same rules, perhaps.
It’s a good point. Free trade with authoritarian regimes is just arming your enemies of the future.
I’m for the peasant. They seem to know what life is about.
Besides, I am a fan of farm raised food.
If I listen to the elites and the modern nobles I will be eating bugs and chemically constructed meat patties that are not meat.
I want real beef, real eggs and lots of fresh butter. I want bacon and ham and I want loads of fresh vegetables and fruits.
I like quiet, the sounds of birds, the smell of wet leaves and of tilled soil. A nice fire pit with a cool beer on a fall evening.
No, the peasants have it right. Its the morons in the capitals and the universities that are the barbarians.
Are you willing to pay more for your food to enable domestic farmers a reasonable standard of living? Are you willing to sacrifice certain kinds of fresh fruit and vegetables and limit yourself to those that grow easily, readily and reliably domestically? That’ll be potatoes, root vegetables and cereals. Apples when they’re in season. I hope you like pickles and preserves because that’s all you’ll be eating for 30% of the year.
Are your romantic ideals of quiet, birds, leaves and tilled soil compatible with the industrial farming methods required to meet the food expectations of our populations?
You may not want to eat bugs (anyone who actually eats local organic vegetables will have!) but the birds do. That means using fewer or no pesticides. Wet leaves and nice country walks means using fewer herbicides.
The “elites and modern nobles” have for decades delivered you abundant food of all varieties at extremely affordable prices. A lot of the time they used immigrant labour to provide the food at prices you accepted.
Throughout that time locally and sustainably produced pro-environment options have always been available but they have always cost more than 2x the supermarket fare and all the people who now pretend to support the blood and soil peasants never paid for it.
The actual “peasants” in our history ate meat and dairy rarely on feast days and mostly survived on cereals or nothing because that’s what reasonably sustainable agriculture provided.
Of course with modern methods and knowledge we could make farming more efficient and better provide for the population but your romantic ideal is far removed from the peasantry. You are not for the peasant. You want to be a noble with peasants working for you.
You should wipe your chin for that fluffing of the mighty and powerful.
The “elites and modern nobles” have for decades delivered you abundant food of all varieties at extremely affordable prices. — Have they, though? It’s as if the people who turn the dirt and do the work have nothing to do with the results.
I don’t defend the mighty and the powerful at all. I just detest the myopic hypocrisy of all these privileged westerners claiming to support farmers or more traditional food/farming but not being prepared to change their habits in any way or pay more for good domestic food. They also ignore the fact that they have willingly consumed cheap foreign produce brought in by the elite nobles for years.
This guy says he’s for the peasant (which is laughable in itself) but has no concept of what “loads of fresh fruit and vegetables” for the millions in France or Britain or anywhere in the world actually looks like.
It looks like us paying a lot more for a lot less. That’s fine by me. I actively prefer local, seasonal and organic produce and keep meat and dairy as a rare treat. It’s just very easy to say you support the peasants or farmers right up until the bill comes due.
if you’re willing and able to find local products, why do you assume others are not? Maybe these “privileged Westerns” you hold in contempt “willingly consumed” foreign-made things because 1) that’s what was on their grocers’ shelves and 2) their govts were not openly waging war against domestic producers.
I have no objection to importing foods that cannot be grown locally or are out of season. None at all. It just makes sense.
I am however a supporter of less industrialized farming run by big corporations and I support mixed use farming and practices such as pasture rotation to reduce the use of chemicals.
I do support local farming. It is one reason I live where I do and why I go to the farmers market as much as possible when it is open.
And, I am prepared to pay more for better food, organic and locally grown. That said, I recognize that there are people who cannot afford that and respect their need to get what they can afford.
I do not expect a perfect system, just one that is better than what we have had and I expect that government should do all it can to support the production of healthy, natural foods in as environmentally conscious and humanely as possible.Food is a unique product. Nobody needs an iPhone to live. Upgrades to your XBox are not going to make you healthier.
You seem to know him fairly well. Did he pee on your tires when you were in the farmers market?
I don’t want to pay a penny more for groceries, which have exploded here in price inflation, entirely because of a grossly exaggerated and at least partly fictional “climate crisis.”
I certainly don’t want poorer people to be forced to choose between food and heat.
Elites over the last 20-30 years have done nothing helpful for rural or urban working classes, besides a pinch of tokenism for certain constituencies.
Terribly one sided trade deals, expensive regulations that are often barely disguised rent seeking, wasteful and frivolous spending, and above all irresponsible and intrusive public policies have done little for actual working people.
How do you force the other side in trade negotiations, which may be more powerful than you, to accept your terms? You cannot.
Can one not just be for anyone who seems to know what life is about, and disdainful of morons, whether they be peasants, urban professionals or university professors ? No-one is forcing anyone to relinquish their steak dinner with a side of asparagus and raspberry for a bowl of bugs; bacon and butter is still plentiful, and wet walks on quiet leaves with the promise of tilled beers in the falling air are still as plentiful as a fire pit of birds.
Cool beer? Hmm, you’ve slightly blown your traditionalist reverie there!
Romantic Eco Poetry
Wir brachten die dunklen Städter in den Buchenwald, wo es brannte!