These propagandistic fuels…

These propagandistic fuels...

September 14 2022

You know we've gotten deep into the muck of propaganda when some miscreants would dare to sully the legacy of Henry George by dredging up how they used to sully us all before he told them to stop.

A news blip, barely a headline, today, about asserting "electricity will never overcome ethanol for cars." Let's draw a line in the ---- sand here and say this is more malfeasance than custom can allow, discursively.

This should be common wisdom, before George Bush Junior came through and screwed the pooch on this.

Our agricultural system is not an agribusiness system. The more these mercantilists with their medieval mentality try to exploit value out of the farm system, they degrade the worth of someone in the system: for the last 40 years, since at least Reagan, it's been the small freeholder of farmland that has been cut out.

Mercantilism, you'll remember if you've discovered it, is like the feudalism of food. Supply people from adjacent farms. It does not work because low prices mean farmers have no incentive to grow enough food. So because this does not work, they instituted something that works better: let food prices be high as possible, circulate food freely, and allow export but not import of excess. This is physiocracy, and it works. 

Play some basic reason here. If you allow ethanol to be such an attractive option, for excess corn, people are going to want to grow more corn. As in, instead of other crops. And sooner or later, it's the beginning of the movie Interstellar, which is the scariest shit, I have ever seen. George Bush Junior is a farmer more or less, but it's exactly these types running so far afield from their fundamental constituency in a human sense that is barely political in the formal sense, they are the most danger to the interests society has, in the background they come from. Everyone wants to get off the farm when the farm sucks and is in trouble, of course. And when they do, they make it worse by trying to fully escape. The bottom line is that ethanol is going to suck away preference for other crops in biodiversity. Corn is great; corn is magical. But excluding corn by preferring it with subsidies and etc. etc. is going to take away from the beans, and the squash and… the others. 

These propagandistic fuels.

They think that they need to talk down to the public about what they should know already but don't - absolutely don't. But the only thing deeper than the cornerstone of agriculture is the dirt and the salts.

Mercantilism is a trap for these folks. It's a revolving door between mercantilism and physiography. The commonsense notion, that isn't commonsense in reality, for people from this background is that "you" don't "have to" advertise food, or even talk it up. You would be surprised. Hence, Henry George in all his perfect glory. 

Why does this all matter enough to take it to the next level? Because despite all, John Adams' last words were "Jefferson lives." New world. New mentality.