Rural America Doesn’t Have to Starve to Death
thenation.com
thenation.com
Sometimes we need to step back from these abstract principles and ask ourselves if we want to live in that kind of world. I'd rather have a country where normal people can farm, animals can live good lives, and we have values other than prostrating ourselves before the altar of GDP.
Btw, hobby farms are a thing. If you want people to be able to pursue hobbies in liu of work, you need a UBI. (Although, a smaller UBI would be suffient to allow for nearly viable hobbies like farming)
There are more important things in the world to think about than how to most efficiently stuff people full of mass quantities of cheap processed meat from suffering animals.
The onlything stoping individuals from farming if they want to is the resources to afford to do so while maintaing the farmers desired lifestyle.
In the past, farmers could get those resources by selling their produce. That became less viable as other models (read, factory farming) started to offer produce cheaper. If you want to maintain the old model, someone needs to pay the difference.
If you want to argue that animal welfare is something that we should value and requires collective (eg government) action to achieve, that would be a valid arguement. You could even argue that such a change would be to the benifit of small farmers.
[0] scare quotes because it was fairly succesfull in its goal of segragation.
Right now rural america is basically subsidised by the cities and has 3x the voting power of those who live in them. This model isn't sustainable unless the three things listed above start to change. But they won't.
This is what FDR did: went left on economic issues, and right on everything else: law and order, pro-military, anti-civil rights, etc. His “brain trust” and bureaucratic supporters came from the upper class (something rural citizens support).