Article by Laura Hollis
Townhall.com
What do you call an economic system where a relative few individuals own all the land and most of the people who live on that land do so at the sufferance of the landowner?
It’s feudalism.
This was the economic system in most of Europe during the Middle Ages. The vast majority of the population was born into, lived and died in poverty. There was little hope for upward mobility unless one opted for a career in military service or the clergy.
The rise of mercantilism and the guild system in northern Europe brought major changes to European feudalism. Poor youth could be apprenticed to merchants and artisans where they learned a skill and a trade.
After a time, apprentices could establish shops of their own. This system eventually created a middle class, and the economic power achieved by the guilds and their members soon translated to political power as well.
Russia, however, lagged hundreds of years behind the rest of Europe. Tsar Alexander II finally freed the country’s serfs in 1861, when the rest of the world had already entered the Industrial Revolution.
The same wealthy Russians who had owned the farms soon owned the factories. The Russian poor went from being feudal peasants on rich farmland to half-starved factory workers in city tenements.
Despair and hopelessness created by centuries of exploitation laid the groundwork for the appeal of Karl Marx’s writings. Russia’s failure to include its poorest citizens in the advances of industrialization was among the driving forces behind the revolutions that would thrust Russia into communism for the next 70-plus years.
America’s trajectory has been quite different.
Our country was founded by men of faith with knowledge of history, politics and economics. We rejected monarchy and nobility.
Our founding documents incorporate principles of universal human dignity and individual rights that not only formed the basis for a republican government elected by the people but also supported the notion of free enterprise.
Unlike Russia (and plenty of other countries) where capitalism and the means of production have been controlled by a small group of wealthy people who use their political power to limit access to others, the United States has had a system of entrepreneurial capitalism. Anyone — even noncitizens — could come here and start their own business. And millions have.
America’s system of entrepreneurial capitalism has been the breeding ground for the American Dream. It has done for this country what the guild system did for northern Europe, and then some.
It has spawned unprecedented innovation, facilitated the creation and distribution of wealth, transformed the law of business enterprise and the widespread use of corporations, made investment and ownership of property and land accessible to the average person, and launched America’s middle, upper-middle and even upper classes.
One would think that this extraordinarily successful system would be sought to be replicated around the globe. But that is not what appears to be happening. Instead, we have a new class of globalist elites who believe that they should control the planet and the lives of everyone on it. Economically secure and politically independent people are difficult to control, so we find ourselves in a situation where our economic security and our political independence are being threatened by those who have made their fortunes in the system they now seek to undermine.
There is no security without food. Global efforts to control farmland and farming, therefore, are creating worldwide worries.
Protests have erupted in the Netherlands in response to “green” regulations to reduce nitrogen emissions, which come mostly from farmers, by half. (Similar regulations imposed in Sri Lanka destroyed that country’s agricultural output and its economy.) The Dutch government has stated that “there (will not be) a future for all farmers” to continue to operate, and EU politicians are calling for a certain percentage of farms to be closed or sold. “Solidarity” protests are now taking place in Germany, Poland, Italy and Spain.
China owns more than $2 billion in U.S. farmland. Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates is now the largest private owner of farmland in the United States, with more than 270,000 acres. Just this month, he acquired another 2,100 acres of farmland in North Dakota. The purchase was originally blocked, but the state’s attorney general ultimately permitted the sale to go through because the farmland “will be leased back to farmers.”
Owning land is quite different from leasing it. A lease is just a contract. Contract terms can be changed. And contracts can be breached, at which point the nonbreaching party must bring a lawsuit for enforcement — assuming that he or she can even afford to do so. Imagine a tenant farmer going up against the attorneys Gates can afford to pay.
In other words, you’re on the land at the sufferance of the landowner. Sound familiar?
Gates is an active member of the World Economic Forum and a zealous advocate of their so-called green policies to avert “climate change” disasters. Gates is pushing for wealthy countries to move to eating “synthetic meat.” (And he is, unsurprisingly, a major investor in the companies that would produce it.) Of course, if plastibeef isn’t your thing, his climate change compadres insist that we eat bugs. And this is without mentioning the push to end private ownership of cars and suburbs with their single-family homes and green yards, forcing the public into densely populated concrete high-rises and onto public transportation.
But will Gates & Co. live this way? You’re joking. They’ll still have their multiple homes, their yachts, their chauffeured limousines, private jets and their meals of Wagyu beef. They will be able to afford everything because they will own everything.
Don’t take my word for it. In 2016, the WEF posted a video on Facebook and Twitter, titled “8 Predictions for 2030.” The video states, “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. Whatever you want, you’ll rent, and it will be delivered by a drone.”
Translation: “We’ll own everything, and you’ll be a serf.”
Thomas Malthus on Population
Population Growth and Agricultural Production Don’t Add Up
Bottom of Form
Rosenberg, Matt. “Thomas Malthus on Population.” ThoughtCo, Aug. 27, 2020, thoughtco.com/thomas-malthus-on-population-1435465.
Updated on March 10, 2019
In 1798, a 32-year-old British economist anonymously published a lengthy pamphlet criticizing the views of the Utopians who believed that life could and would definitely improve for humans on earth. The hastily written text, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers, was published by Thomas Robert Malthus.
Thomas Robert Malthus
Born on February 14 or 17, 1766 in Surrey, England, Thomas Malthus was educated at home. His father was a Utopian and a friend of the philosopher David Hume. In 1784 he attended Jesus College and graduated in 1788; in 1791 Thomas Malthus earned his master’s degree.
Thomas Malthus argued that because of the natural human urge to reproduce human population increases geometrically (1, 2, 4, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc.). However, food supply, at most, can only increase arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, etc.).
Therefore, since food is an essential component to human life, population growth in any area or on the planet, if unchecked, would lead to starvation.
However, Malthus also argued that there are preventative checks and positive checks on the population that slow its growth and keep the population from rising exponentially for too long, but still, poverty is inescapable and will continue.
Thomas Malthus’ example of population growth doubling was based on the preceding 25 years of the brand-new United States of America. Malthus felt that a young country with fertile soil like the U.S. would have one of the highest birth rates around.
He liberally estimated an arithmetic increase in agricultural production of one acre at a time, acknowledging that he was overestimating but he gave agricultural development the benefit of the doubt.
According to Thomas Malthus, preventative checks are those that affect the birth rate and include marrying at a later age (moral restraint), abstaining from procreation, birth control, and homosexuality.
Malthus, a religious chap (he worked as a clergyman in the Church of England), considered birth control and homosexuality to be vices and inappropriate (but nonetheless practiced).
Positive checks are those, according to Thomas Malthus, that increase the death rate. These include disease, war, disaster, and finally when other checks don’t reduce the population, famine.
Malthus felt that the fear of famine or the development of famine was also a major incentive to reduce the birth rate. He stated that potential parents are less likely to have children when they know that their children are likely to starve.
Thomas Malthus also advocated welfare reform. Recent Poor Laws had provided a system of welfare that provided an increased amount of money depending on the number of children in a family.
Malthus argued that this only encouraged the poor to give birth to more children as they would have no fear that increased numbers of offspring would make eating any more difficult. (sound familiar?)
Increased numbers of poor workers would reduce labor costs and ultimately make the poor even poorer.
He also stated that if the government or an agency were to provide a certain amount of money to every poor person, prices would simply rise and the value of money would change.
As well, since population increases faster than production, the supply would essentially be stagnant or dropping so the demand would increase and so would price. Nonetheless, he suggested that capitalism was the only economic system that could function.
The ideas that Thomas Malthus developed came before the industrial revolution and focused on plants, animals, and grains as the key components of the diet.
Therefore, for Malthus, available productive farmland was a limiting factor in population growth. With the industrial revolution and the increase in agricultural production, land has become a less important factor than it was during the 18th century.
Thomas Malthus printed the second edition of his Principles of Population in 1803 and produced several additional editions until the sixth edition in 1826.
Malthus was awarded the first professorship in Political Economy at the East India Company’s College at Haileybury and was elected to the Royal Society in 1819.
He’s often known today as the “patron saint of demography” and while some argue that his contributions to population studies were unremarkable, he did indeed cause population and demographics to become a topic of serious academic study. Thomas Malthus died in Somerset, England in 1834.
Darwin’s theory of evolution and its social, economic, and political impact on American society.
- In any given area, more life forms come into existence than the environment can possibly support. (Thomas Malthus)
- From the moment of their birth, no two organisms are exactly alike.
- In the struggle among individuals, those differences which are advantageous, however minute, will enable their possessors to survive.
- The winners in the struggle for existence will transmit their characteristics by heredity.
Impacts:
Social: Poor are poor because they are “less fit” (natural selection). Also, brought about racism.
Political: Winners in war are more fit than their opponents.
Economic: My business is more fit than your business, so it is ok to drive you out.