The Third Opening of the West, Part 2 — Growing Debt

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Those who think small subsistence farming is a great way to live; haven’t tried it. All individual farming and ranching is subsistence.
Twenty-first century rendition of a twentieth century proverb.

Last week at this time, equity markets around the world were elated because it was believed that finally European leaders were close to working out a deal that would save Greece from financial default and the whole world would again be on the wide superhighway to the continual Industrial Age global shining city on the consumptive hill.

What we have learned in the meantime is that the hill has turned out to be a mound of garbage and the deal that finally immerged was just another can kicked upon the heap.

There is no free lunch. But when we move to the world of agriculture, the reality is that our lunch is as close to free as possible. Because of government supports of industrialized agriculture in this country, we have so altered natural equilibriums of markets around the world, that when, not if, we finally deal with the end of this portion of the global debt supercycle, we will be forced to close the free lunch counter.

That only constant change, will eventually lead to opportunities to redefine farming and ranching into an opportunity that really can be a great way to live, because it will reshape rural life into something beyond industrial factory farms and ranches.

This year we have spent a great deal of time trying to draw a distinction between the twentieth century and the end of the Industrial Age and a twenty-first century Individual Age. We see the germinating seeds of these global changes in the Tea Party, the Arab Spring and the current Occupy movement in this country. What all these common natural human community functions demonstrate is a diversity of human needs and capacities beyond the Industrial model of humans as specialized production-consumptive machines.

As these changes move forward, a new reality will begin to emerge in which the dinosaurs, behemoths and leviathans of the Industrial Age will not be able to adapt to these opportunities, because even though they have access to capital, their inherited size, simplistic thinking, and the inability to adapt to the unintended consequences of their actions, will not allow them to utilize the energetic new efficiencies of flexible developmental scales and the opportunities these innovative changes create.

Tags: Industrial Age, Individual Age, agriculture, Greece, GDP, World War I