Half an Acre

I made a comment on YouTube about “Freedom.”

Interestingly, freedom is inextricably linked with inheritance. Start with land….this is where the indigenous Americans were in conflict with Europeans. We acquire and hold land and pass it down to our children and eventually, without checks or balances, all the land concentrates into a small group or even into one family. The rest are denied the freedom to own land because there is none left. Everything…. economics, wars, culture, etc. starts with this. Find a way to give citizens a birthright to a certain amount of land and they will start to care about democracy.

After making the comment I googled the amount of arable land in the United States and then divided that by the population and come up with just a little over 1 acre. I then googled how much land it takes to feed one person. An “off-the-grid” website stated that about half an acre would provide calories in fruit and vegetables for one person. Modern agriculture of course produces yields an order of magnitude greater than this, perhaps orders of magnitude.

Fox News has always used “Freedom” in a certain context that makes the term interchangeable in their reporting with “Greed.” I noticed this many years ago that Fox is usually using “Freedom” in terms of taxation or regulation and substituting “Greed” actually worked quite well and even made their view clearer.

The point being that America was originally about owning land, so you were not owned by a landowner. That land either fed you or produced something you could barter for food. Western democracy did not start with ancestral landowners; it started with city dwellers in ancient Greece with no such franchise who were craftsmen or merchants or another profession. These city dwellers were dictated to by kings or some entity that was a proxy for landowners. These landowners also were the citizen warriors that defended the city state and were not to challenged.

The city dwellers created democracy to limit the wealth and power of the richest landowners who became ever more rapacious and ruthless and fixed prices to impoverish others who ended up as slaves. They also regularly started wars for land the city dwellers were called to fight in for little benefit unless defending against aggressors. The modern world has in some ways become simpler than the ancient world in that almost everything is now organized to worship a single god…money. Where money took third place to food and then land for most of history it has now become a universal religion that determines all things.

This is the story to teach to people so they might have a basic understanding of democracy. The purpose of democracy is to keep the dangerous and ruinous ambitions of individuals in check and enable the greatest good for the greatest number. The Representative Democracy found in our Republic was created in part to balance this check by enabling citizens to pursue their personal goals and aspirations, which rewards individuals and is valuable to the whole nation. A feature of any functioning democracy is some form of “Limitarianism.” This is what I call “walking the tightrope” between the needs of the populace, or, to use the term conservatives have demonized, the collective, and the wants of individuals. That billionaires in America are presently stepping up and without apology pouring vast sums into electing, what those not in his Cult know to be, a fascist, is almost unbelievable. But it must be believed because it is happening. Sadly, our complacent consumer programmed society does not seem too concerned.

The election that may end America is less than two weeks away and democrats like me, or about half the country, are terrified. That we cannot understand how the other half of is so gullible and committed to ending democracy is profoundly depressing to many of us. All we can do is pray…and vote.