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ECoNomY rule
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Because if the farmer doesn't, starving people will either die, or wise up and take the food by force. Usually the starving people aren't in the majority, so they work with sympathetic individuals who recognize that they might be next. So that the farmer has the resources to continue, the mob takes resources from those that have excess, by force. If the farmer is not motivated because they can't make big profit margins, then someone without the mental illness of greed will eventually replace the farmer.
This would result into some kind of farm run by the community, which means that volunteers are working on the farm, providing free food to everyone. However, this begs the question if the food produced by inexperienced volunteers with good intentions is sufficient to feed an entire village, town, city or a country.
It's how villages worked for thousands of years, isn't it? Open to correction by any historian.
I'm no professional historian or anything, but as far as I know, back in prehistoric era hunters & gatherers used to share basically everything with each other without anything in return.
When the people stopped moving around and settled at one place to farm land, the first agricultural society was founded, where people didn't use money but goods (such as food itself) as a currency to trade with each other.
Once again, I'm not a professional historian, just a guy who read some books, so feel free to correct me.
It all depends on how many people need to work to maintain society vs how many will work for the greater good.
If the only options for the farmer are let people starve or get raided, why would he choose to be a farmer then? Seems more likely he'd do something else or join the mob rather than become a farmer in the first place.
Because if he doesn't farm he starves as well. The issue is that people doesn't think through the long term common good consequences of their actions, less so because they're selfish, but more so because people aren't designed to think that way.
Which is why I added that instead of being a farmer, he could just join the mob of people that would have raided him if he had been a farmer. Why aren't they all farming?
This is forgetting the fact that we already socialize several things in our society. We've agreed that national protection is necessary, so if you're a citizen of most countries, you're paying taxes that pay for a military. We could very easily socialize food as well.
Take social security for example - it will provide some level of retirement, but you won't be living a life of luxury. There is no reason why we can't apply this model to food, healthcare, water, electricity, etc (and in certain circumstances, we often do.) This doesn't mean that those on medicare are being cared for while doctors are held at gunpoint, it means that we use taxes to do a tiny bit of taking care of people.
We're a society beyond real scarcity, only artificial scarcity. Our productivity levels over the last few hundred years especially has increased exponentially. Just since the 40 hour work week was standardized upon, we've made leaps and bounds but been allowed to realize none of those gains.
We're so brainwashed in the US we don't even realize that quite a few other countries already do these things more successfully than we do, and pretend like there is no other possibility.