Well, let me say this about small scale farming, Its a lot like shooting craps, but theres a lot of work involved. Large scale frmers face a lot of the same issues but should be diversified enough to survive many stumbling blocks.Im a hobby farmer with 45 acres in row crops and 15 in pasture. If I could expand that 20 or 30 fold I could probably earn a decent living ------most years. Generally the more labor intense farming gets the more volatile the market gets.
Any how, I wanted to voice an opinion on the lack of labor for farming, auto mechanics, welding, goes on and on. One of the biggest problems we as Americans have is that our standard of living has become too high and people can live at or above the standard that I grew up with in the 40s, 50s and 60s. When I was a litle kid a trip to town was a once every one to 2 week trip. The first official job I had was a $ an hour. Moved up in the world the next year to 2$ an hour!!!. Supported a car and all the other bad habits of a teenager. My family over the first 10 or 12 years of my life had one car, not new. Ready for this one of the newest one was a Kaiser-Frazer 3 door. It was 2 years old when we got it. My father was a production mechanical engineer so we were better off than most people. I never saw or heard of any starvation at school or in any other context. People less well to do still usually had one car, maybe 2 depending on the age of still at home children and most owned their own homes. .People usually replied to want adds to the point they werent in the paper very long.
Today it seems entitlement folk have a higher standard of living than working class people of my youth and if they choose to extend it there seems to be little to prevent that. Further when we have large numbers of young high energy people with nothing except video games to occupy their attention, drugs and crime dont lag far behind.
Conclusion our financial, economic system is deranged and needs major adjustments. Unfortunately we are not going to do this voluntarily although we almost got there in '09. When people have to work for a living because there is no better(?) alternative then the "living wage"becomes a real concept. The people making one or 2 dollars an hour didnt live lavishly but they lived reasonably well with a 12" black and white TV. They went to the $0.25 movies once or twice a month. (10 cents at my age). I had 2 pairs of shoes old pair(getting too small) for work and new pair for school. Side tracked. We need to make the job market more attractive by making the differential between entitlement and paid wages wider. I dont think the way to do this is to increase minimum wages but rather to make the guaranteed handoud lower and less desireable. Like any major medicalm change there will be side effects.
