Build the wall

[Farm Boy]

You'd have to pay more for food(mostly fruits and vegetables) or the subsidy would have to extend past high-need-based food assistance(still the majority of the farm bill). You pay electricians. You pay plumbers. You tip the delivery guy.

People will work hard if you pay them and they get some form of positive social status*. Which is sort of the point of the big rats outside non-union sites. Biggest difference? You can get away with doing that and not get called a fascist or racist.

*oncology nurses lose people all the time. It's brutal and they get tough. But they still do it, if a mental image that isn't some leathery brown dude or overweight guy in flannel helps.

 

[Lexicus]

It's not really that simple. Cheap food benefits a lot of people outside the rural farming areas. To raise wages such that you could attract labor away from other, better jobs, would then distort all other wages.

Markets do not always produce the outcomes we'd want them to. Sometimes adjustments have to be made.

Distort, or correct?

 

[Lexicus]

You pay electricians. You pay plumbers. You tip the delivery guy.

Exactly. If someone can't live on what they're paid doing work, then you can do without their work.

 

[Farm Boy]

In a political economy, I'm not sure that's true? I legit don't know.

 

[El_Machinae]

I don't know what would happen if we commodified all labour and then demanded at least a living wage from said work. My suspicion is that it wouldn't work out, because the destruction of all the lower-value output would cause too much of an output drop. As a passing example, there are a LOT of middle aged and senior women taking care of their parents for free and I don't know what would happen if a living wage was demanded. Of course, if we commodified all labour, then all the numbers change completely, so no model of taxation then paying people would really be worth anything. But we put a lot of work into people who cannot reciprocally trade - I suspect way more than we put into the people who skim off all the profits of our work.
Theoretically, it should all balance out, since obviously you need to have survivable living conditions before you can take care of your parents. But I wouldn't really trust any models.

From a geo-strategic standpoint, if you have a willing labor pool that will voluntarily come there and work hard for cheap you'd be mad to refuse them. Skimming welfare provisions or taxing public resources would be one thing, but 'will work hard for cheap then leave' only is bad for your society if your society is broken.

 

[Sommerswerd]

I imagine many Americans would do farm labor if it paid enough.

"Enough" is meaningless if it means that it will make the produce so expensive that not enough people will buy it/be able to afford it to justify growing the crop.

 

[Birdjaguar]

"Enough" is meaningless if it means that it will make the produce so expensive that not enough people will buy it/be able to afford it to justify growing the crop.

Fresh fruits and veggies only for the rich!

 

[Farm Boy]

It's not like I eat them every week. That's a specific trip. Trying to like the canned and frozen stuff better. Stupid frozen broccoli increased 150% last time I went to The General.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Fresh fruits and veggies only for the rich!

Grown on their own private small gardens/farms/ranches designed to feed only themselves and their families/friends.

 

[Farm Boy]

Seasonally, then!

... it's canning time!

 

[Cutlass]

Distort, or correct?

It's not really that simple a question. While much of farm labor is now machine driven, and so vastly more productive than it used to be (think grains), much of it is still back-breakingly difficult and exhausting. On top of that, it is seasonal and migratory work. On top of that, it is largely in places distant from other work.

As such, it will only be done by people who are both very physically tough, and by people who literally do not have better options. So just how much do you have to pay people to take those jobs? Hint: You'll never fill those jobs with Americans. Not for any price. So now you cannot build those labor costs into the product costs. Because now the product is unaffordable. And those farmers just have to be forced out of business. Or you can subsidize the wage, and you still will not fill those jobs with Americans, because the reality is that nearly any American who can do the work can get a better job elsewhere.


Once upon a time this problem was solved by slaves. Later it was solved by sharecroppers. Farm labor who had no ability to leave to make their lives better. This is not the choice now.


Or you can build a system of immigrant migrant farm workers which is better than what we have now, and actually works for everyone involved.

You see, to the immigrant migrant farm worker, doing so in the United States is still better than what they were doing back home. They will do it because it is an improvement to their lives. Americans will not do it, because it is a downgrade to their lives. But, all that said, there are many things which can be done to make the situation better for the migrant farm worker. And the first and most important of these is that the migrant farm worker's children get to be immigrants, with an education, and the chance to not be migrant farm workers. Even wage increases are secondary to that.

These people are willing to do the hardest and most miserable work in the world, so that their children don't have to. And if we want America to grow all the produce that the nation's farms can produce, then in order to do so, we have to accept the immigrants, and give their children a future.

We cannot be a nation self reliant on our own food, and be a nation which rejects immigrants. We cannot have both. The US is blessed beyond any other nation in our ability to produce food. But only if we have the labor to do so.

 

[Farm Boy]

You speak like it takes whips to walk beans. I refuse to believe urban Americans are so pathetic and weak. It takes pay, and not being looked down on like you must be so disadvantaged and insufficient untaught soas to have no other options. The rest is just people just not wanting to pay. Or subsidize, however the accounting works.

I don't know, maybe you are right! You've got a better read on them than I do regarding picking apples.

 

[Cutlass]

You speak like it takes whips to walk beans. I refuse to believe urban Americans are so pathetic and weak. It takes pay, and not being looked down on line you have no other options. The rest is just people just not wanting to pay. Or subsidize, however the accounting works.

I don't know, maybe you are right! You've got a better read on them than I do regarding picking apples.

45 years ago my brother spent a summer picking veggies, and a summer picking tobacco. Those were good jobs for a kid who was tough, and under 16. As they were the summer jobs you could start at 14. Then after turning 16, he found better jobs. And those farms don't exist in this area any longer.

A person who can do that work can find better jobs.

 

[Farm Boy]

Better.

 

[Lexicus]

It does seem like a rather circular argument, eh? I think the unspoken implicit part is basically that it's either good or necessary to have an exploited underclass doing manual labor in society. Calhoun was right?

 

[Cutlass]

Better.

Yes, better. It's a better job to be loading trucks somewhere at a warehouse 5 days a week than it is to be chasing work all over the country year round. At least you get to have a home.

 

[Broken_Erika]

My dad took a year off high-school to work on a farm plowing fields with a tractor that had no power steering of any kind, when he returned to school he was the strongest kid there.

 

[Hygro]

If I could have made $30 an hour picking fruit for a season full time without hustling my way there as my life goal, living in a seasonal housing shack with hot water I would have done that.

I don’t know what prices are reasonable, at prices America can afford I would have definitely at least tried it out.

 

[Farm Boy]

For 30 dollars an hour you get a traveling CNA in a (rich, so)blue state, and they wipe butts on the night shift. There's gotta be some flex.

I hear you on the point that all those farms are out of business. Simply raising the minimum wage on the labor would mean the business goes out and the void gets filled by imports(assuming they are to be had and the dollar remains strong)*. Those, internationally, that were buying the reallocated commodities either wait for an increase in alternate production or get a haircut on consumption, or redirect spending. Not necessarily great policy goals. It's a political economy, we subsidize fuels of all sorts. We subsidize weapons, we subsidize food. It's all about where we want to put resources, what we wish to reward.

*Or alternatively, high capital-holders automate and dominate. That seems suitably American-mentality enough. We do love that Amazon crap.

 

[Hygro]

If 1% of USA workers are farmers, and all were full time employees making $30/hour, total "cost" (also a benefit) to the United States economy is $90 billion. We as a people can certainly afford that. Again I don't know what the wage "should" be, and how it should be financed and by whom, but I definitely know there are wages we could afford that are high enough to motivate hapless out of shape nerds like I have been.